i.
It started with a prayer.
Tasha Samar was thirteen years old the first time she heard the
bewitching buzz of their voices. It was their turban-to-toe white ensembles
and meditation malas that first caught her eye, but it was how they spoke
that beckoned her through the front door. She heard them through the open
window of a Kundalini yoga studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The
prayers were so strange, all in another language,” Tasha, now twenty-nine,
tells me over macadamia milk lattes at an outdoor café in West Hollywood.
We’re less than a few miles away from the epicenter of the sinister life she
led until only three years ago. Judging by her crisp cream button-down and
satiny blowout, you’d never guess she could once tie a turban as naturally
as any other young woman in this courtyard could toss her hair into a
topknot. “Yeah, I could still do it now, if I had to,” Tasha assures me, her
meticulous acrylics clack-clack-clacking on her porcelain mug.
Tasha, a first-generation Russian American Jew who experienced an
agonizing lack of belonging her entire childhood, was struck by this yoga
group’s sense of closeness, so she peeked her head into the lobby and asked
the receptionist who they were. “The front-desk girl started telling me the
basics; the phrase ‘the science of the mind’ was used a lot,” Tasha reflects.
“I didn’t know what it meant, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really want
to try that.’” Tasha found out when the next yoga class would be, and her
parents let her attend. You didn’t need to be a permanent member of the
group to take a class—the only requirement was an “open heart.” Learning
and reciting their foreign prayers, all directed toward a man with a long
peppery beard whose photograph was plastered throughout the dimly lit
studio, cast a spell over tween Tasha. “It felt ancient,” she says, “like I was
a part of something holy.”
Who was this group in all white? The Healthy, Happy, Holy
Organization, or 3HO—a Sikh-derived “alternative religion” founded in the
1970s, which hosts Kundalini yoga classes all over the US. The guy with
the beard? Their captivating, well-connected leader, Harbhajan Singh
Khalsa (or Yogi Bhajan), who claimed—to much contest—to be the official
religious and administrative head of all Western Sikhs, and who was worth
hundreds of millions of dollars by the time he died in 1993. The language?
Gurmukhi, the writing system of modern Punjabi and Sikh scripture. The
ideology? To obey Yogi Bhajan’s strict New Age teachings, which included
abstaining from meat and alcohol,* surrendering to his arranged marriages,
waking up at four thirty every morning to read scripture and attend yoga
class, and not associating with anyone who didn’t follow . . . or who
wouldn’t be following soon.
As soon as she turned eighteen, Tasha moved to Los Angeles, one of
3HO’s home bases, and for eight years, she dedicated her entire life—all
her time and money—to the group. After a series of exhaustive trainings,
she became a full-time Kundalini yoga instructor and, within months, was
attracting big-name, spiritually curious celebrities to her Malibu classes:
Demi Moore, Russell Brand, Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody. Even if they
didn’t become full-time followers, their attendance was good PR for 3HO.
Tasha’s swamis (teachers) praised her for raking in the dollars and
allegiances of the rich, famous, and seeking. At the café, Tasha unsheathes
her phone from an inky black clutch to show me old photos of her and
Demi Moore, garbed in ghost-white short-shorts and turbans, twirling
around a desert retreat, backdropped by Joshua trees. Tasha slowly blinks
her eyelash extensions as a bewildered smile blooms across her face, as if to
say, Yeah, I can’t believe I did this shit, either.
Obedience like Tasha’s promised to yield great rewards. Just learn the
right words, and they’d be yours: “There was a mantra to attract your soul
mate, one to acquire lots of money, one to look better than ever, one to give
birth to a more evolved, higher-vibration generation of children,” Tasha
divulges. Disobey? You’d come back in the next life on a lower vibration.
Mastering 3HO’s secret mantras and code words made Tasha feel
separate from everyone else she knew. Chosen. On a higher vibration.
Solidarity like this intensified when everyone in the group was assigned a
new name. A name-giver appointed by Yogi Bhajan used something called
tantric numerology as an algorithm to determine followers’ special 3HO
monikers, which they received in exchange for a fee. All women were
given the same middle name, Kaur, while men were all christened Singh.
Everyone shared the last name Khalsa. Like one big family. “Getting your
new name was the biggest deal ever,” Tasha says. “Most people would
change their names on their driver’s licenses.” Until last year, Tasha
Samar’s California ID read “Daya Kaur Khalsa.”
It might not have been totally apparent, what with the peaceable yoga
classes and high-profile supporters, but there was a dangerous undercurrent
to 3HO—psychological and sexual abuse by Yogi Bhajan, forced fasting
and sleep deprivation, threats of violence toward anyone attempting to leave
the group, suicides, even an unsolved murder. Once followers fully adopted
the group’s jargon, higher-ups were able to weaponize it. Threats were
structured in phrases like “Piscean consciousness,” “negative mind,” “lizard
brain.” Take a bite of a friend’s meaty burger or fail to attend yoga class,
and lizard brain, lizard brain, lizard brain would play on a loop in your
mind. Often, familiar English terms that once held a positive meaning were
recast to signify something threatening. “Like ‘old soul,’” Tasha tells me.
To an average English speaker, “old soul” connotes someone with wisdom
beyond their years. It’s a compliment. But in 3HO, it incited dread. “It
meant someone had been coming back life after life, incarnation after
incarnation, and they couldn’t get it right,” she explains. Even three years
after escaping 3HO, Tasha still shudders whenever she hears the phrase.
In 2009, shortly after Tasha arrived in Southern California to give her
life to 3HO, another eighteen-year-old moved to LA to start a new life. Her
name was Alyssa Clarke, and she’d come down the coast from Oregon to
start college. Afraid of gaining the freshman fifteen, Alyssa decided to try
joining a gym. She had always struggled with body image, and she was
intimidated by LA’s formidable fitness scene. So, over holiday break, when
she reunited with a family member who’d recently started a new workout
program, dropped a ton of weight, and beamed with the honeymoon glow
of fresh muscle tone, Alyssa thought, Damn, I have to check that out.
The new workout was called CrossFit, and there was a location right
near Alyssa’s dorm. Upon returning from break, she and her boyfriend
signed up for a beginners workshop. The sweaty, sculpted instructors oozed
masculine enthusiasm as they introduced Alyssa to a whole new world of
terminology she’d never heard before: The gym wasn’t called a gym, it was
a “box.” Instructors weren’t teachers or trainers, they were “coaches.” Their
workouts consisted of “functional movements.” You had your WoD
(workout of the day), which might consist of snatches and clean-and-jerks.
You had your BPs (bench presses), your BSs (back squats), your C2Bs
(chest-to-bars), and your inevitable DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness).
Who doesn’t love a catchy acronym? Alyssa was captivated by how tight-
knit all these CrossFitters seemed—they had such a culture—and was dead
set on mastering their private patois.
A portrait of CrossFit’s founder, Greg Glassman (known then to
devotees as “The WoDFather,” or simply “Coach”), hung on the wall of
Alyssa’s box next to one of his most famous quotes, a fitness proverb that
would soon sear into her brain: “Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds,
some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support
exercise but not body fat. Practice and train major lifts . . . master the basics
of gymnastics . . . bike, run, swim, row . . . hard and fast. Five or six days
per week.” Alyssa was taken with how CrossFit focused on shaping
members’ mentalities not just inside the box, but everywhere. When driving
trainees to work harder, coaches would bellow “Beast mode!” (a
motivational phrase that reverberated through Alyssa’s thoughts at school
and work, too). To help you internalize the CrossFit philosophy, they’d
repeat “EIE,” which meant “Everything is everything.”
When Alyssa noticed everyone at her box was wearing Lululemon, she
went out and dropped $400 on designer workout swag. (Even Lululemon
had its own distinctive vernacular. It was printed all over their shopping
bags, so customers would walk out of the store carrying mantras like,
“There is little difference between addicts and fanatic athletes,” “Visualize
your eventual demise,” and “Friends are more important than money”—all
coined by their so-called “tribe” leader, Lululemon’s founder, Chip Wilson,
an aging G.I. Joe type just like Greg Glassman whose acolytes were equally
devout. Who knew fitness could inspire such religiosity?)
As soon as Alyssa learned that most CrossFitters followed a Paleo diet,
she cut out gluten and sugar. If she made plans to go out of town and knew
she wouldn’t be able to make her normal workout time, she quickly alerted
someone at the box, lest they publicly shame her in their Facebook group
for no-showing. Coaches and members were all fooling around with each
other, so after Alyssa and her boyfriend split, she started hooking up with a
trainer named Flex (real name: Andy; he changed it after joining the box).
So here’s the big question: What do Alyssa’s and Tasha’s stories have in
common?
The answer: They were both under cultish influence. If you’re skeptical
of applying the same charged “cult” label to both 3HO and CrossFit, good.
You should be. For now, let’s agree on this: Even though one of our
protagonists ended up broke, friendless, and riddled with PTSD, and the
other got herself a strained hamstring, a codependent friend with benefits,
and a few too many pairs of overpriced leggings, what Tasha Samar and
Alyssa Clarke irrefutably share is that one day, they woke up on different
sides of Los Angeles and realized they were in so deep, they weren’t even
speaking recognizable English anymore. Though the stakes and
consequences of their respective affiliations differed considerably, the
methods used to assert such power—to create community and solidarity, to
establish an “us” and a “them,” to align collective values, to justify
questionable behavior, to instill ideology and inspire fear—were uncannily,
cultishly similar. And the most compelling techniques had little to do with
drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or “Kool-
Aid” . . . instead, they had everything to do with language.
ii.
Cultish groups are an all-out American obsession. One of the most
gushed-over debut novels of the 2010s was Emma Cline’s The Girls,
chronicling a teenager’s summer-long dalliance with a Manson-type cult in
the late 1960s. HBO’s 2015 Scientology documentary Going Clear was
critically deemed “impossible to ignore.” Devoured with equal gusto was
Netflix’s 2018 docuseries Wild Wild Country, which told of the
controversial guru Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) and his Rajneeshpuram
commune; embellished by an irresistibly hip playlist and vintage footage of
his red-clad apostles, the show earned an Emmy and millions of online
streams. All any of my friends could talk about the week I started writing
this book was the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, about a (fictional)
murderous Dionysian cult in Sweden characterized by psychedelic-fueled
sex rituals and human sacrifices. And all anyone is talking about now as I
edit this book in 2020 are The Vow and Seduced, dueling docuseries about
NXIVM, the self-help scam turned sex-trafficking ring. The well of cult-
inspired art and intrigue is bottomless. When it comes to gurus and their
groupies, we just can’t seem to look away.
I once heard a psychologist explain that rubbernecking results from a
very real physiological response: You see an auto accident, or any disaster
—or even just news of a disaster, like a headline—and your brain’s
amygdala, which controls emotions, memory, and survival tactics, starts
firing signals to your problem-solving frontal cortex to try to figure out
whether this event is a direct danger to you. You enter fight-or-flight mode,
even if you’re just sitting there. The reason millions of us binge cult
documentaries or go down rabbit holes researching groups from Jonestown
to QAnon is not that there’s some twisted voyeur inside us all that’s
inexplicably attracted to darkness. We’ve all seen enough car crashes and
read enough cult exposés; if all we wanted was a spooky fix, we’d be bored
already. But we’re not bored, because we’re still hunting for a satisfying
answer to the question of what causes seemingly “normal” people to join—
and, more important, stay in—fanatical fringe groups with extreme
ideologies. We’re scanning for threats, on some level wondering, Is
everyone susceptible to cultish influence? Could it happen to you? Could it
happen to me? And if so, how?
Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult
influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” Why did
all those people die in Jonestown? “They drank the Kool-Aid!” Why don’t
abused polygamist sister wives get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they
can? “They’re mind controlled!” Simple as that.
But it’s actually not that simple. In fact, brainwashing is a
pseudoscientific concept that the majority of psychologists I interviewed
denounce (more on that in a bit). Truer answers to the question of cult
influence can only arrive when you ask the right questions: What
techniques do charismatic leaders use to exploit people’s fundamental needs
for community and meaning? How do they cultivate that kind of power?
The answer, as it turns out, is not some freaky mind-bending wizardry
that happens on a remote commune where everyone dons flower crowns
and dances in the sun. (That’s called Coachella . . . which, one could argue,
is its own kind of “cult.”) The real answer all comes down to words.
Delivery. From the crafty redefinition of existing words (and the invention
of new ones) to powerful euphemisms, secret codes, renamings, buzzwords,
chants and mantras, “speaking in tongues,” forced silence, even hashtags,
language is the key means by which all degrees of cultlike influence occur.
Exploitative spiritual gurus know this, but so do pyramid schemers,
politicians, CEOs of start-ups, online conspiracy theorists, workout
instructors, even social media influencers. In both positive ways and
shadowy ones, “cult language” is, in fact, something we hear and are
swayed by every single day. Our speech in regular life—at work, in Spin
class, on Instagram—is evidence of our varying degrees of “cult”
membership. You just have to know what to listen for. Indeed, while we’re
distracted by the Manson Family’s peculiar outfits* and other flashy “cult”
iconography, what we wind up missing is the fact that one of the biggest
factors in getting people to a point of extreme devotion, and keeping them
there, is something we cannot see.
Though “cult language” comes in different varieties, all charismatic
leaders—from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos to SoulCycle instructors—use the
same basic linguistic tools. This is a book about the language of fanaticism
in its many forms: a language I’m calling Cultish (like English, Spanish, or
Swedish). Part 1 of this book will investigate the language we use to talk
about cultish groups, busting some widely believed myths about what the
word “cult” even means. Then, parts 2 through 5 will unveil the key
elements of cultish language, and how they’ve worked to inveigle followers
of groups as destructive as Heaven’s Gate and Scientology . . . but also how
they pervade our day-to-day vocabularies. In these pages, we’ll discover
what motivates people, throughout history and now, to become fanatics,
both for good and for evil. Once you understand what the language of
“Cultish” sounds like, you won’t be able to unhear it.
Language is a leader’s charisma. It’s what empowers them to create a
mini universe—a system of values and truths—and then compel their
followers to heed its rules. In 1945, the French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty wrote that language is human beings’ element just as “water
is the element of fish.” So it’s not as if Tasha’s foreign mantras and Alyssa’s
acronyms played some small role in molding their “cult” experiences.
Rather, because words are the medium through which belief systems are
manufactured, nurtured, and reinforced, their fanaticism fundamentally
could not exist without them. “Without language, there are no beliefs,
ideology, or religion,” John E. Joseph, a professor of applied linguistics at
the University of Edinburgh, wrote to me from Scotland. “These concepts
require a language as a condition of their existence.” Without language,
there are no “cults.”
Certainly, you can hold beliefs without explicitly articulating them, and
it’s also true that if Tasha or Alyssa did not want to buy into their leaders’
messages, no collection of words could’ve forced them into it. But with a
glimmer of willingness, language can do so much to squash independent
thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally
charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible. The way a
person communicates can tell us a lot about who they’ve been associating
with, who they’ve been influenced by. How far their allegiance goes.
The motives behind culty-sounding language are not always crooked.
Sometimes they’re quite healthy, like to boost solidarity or to rally people
around a humanitarian mission. One of my best friends works for a cancer
nonprofit and brings back amusing stories of the love-bomb-y buzzwords
and quasi-religious mantras they repeat on end to keep fund-raisers hyped:
“Someday is today”; “This is our Week of Winning”; “Let’s fly above and
beyond”; “You are the greatest generation of warriors and heroes in this
quest for a cancer cure.” “It reminds me of the way multilevel marketing
people talk,” she tells me (referencing culty direct sales companies like
Mary Kay and Amway—more on these later). “It’s cultlike, but for a good
cause. And hey, it works.” In part 5 of this book, we’ll learn about all sorts
of woo-woo chants and hymns used in “cult fitness” studios that may sound
extremist to skeptical outsiders, but aren’t actually all that destructive when
you take a closer listen.
Whether wicked or well-intentioned, language is a way to get members
of a community on the same ideological page. To help them feel like they
belong to something big. “Language provides a culture of shared
understanding,” said Eileen Barker, a sociologist who studies new religious
movements at the London School of Economics. But wherever there are
fanatically worshipped leaders and belief-bound cliques, some level of
psychological pressure is at play. This could be as quotidian as your average
case of FOMO, or as treacherous as being coerced to commit violent
crimes. “Quite frankly, the language is everything,” one ex-Scientologist
told me in a hushed tone during an interview. “It’s what insulates you. It
makes you feel special, like you’re in the know, because you have this other
language to communicate with.”
Before we can get into the nuts and bolts of cultish language, however,
we must focus on a key definition: What does the word “cult” even mean,
exactly? As it turns out, coming up with one conclusive definition is tricky
at best. Over the course of researching and writing this book, my
understanding of the word has only become hazier and more fluid. I’m not
the only one flummoxed by how to pin down “cult.” I recently conducted a
small street survey near my home in Los Angeles, where I asked a couple
dozen strangers what they thought the word meant; answers ranged from “A
small group of believers led by a deceptive figure with too much power” to
“Any group of people who are really passionate about something” all the
way to “Well, a cult could be anything, couldn’t it? You could have a coffee
cult, or a surfing cult.” And not a single response was delivered with
certainty.
There’s a reason for this semantic murkiness. It’s connected to the fact
that the fascinating etymology of “cult” (which I’ll chronicle shortly)
corresponds precisely to our society’s ever-changing relationship to
spirituality, community, meaning, and identity—a relationship that’s gotten
rather . . . weird. Language change is always reflective of social change, and
over the decades, as our sources of connection and existential purpose have
shifted due to phenomena like social media, increased globalization, and
withdrawal from traditional religion, we’ve seen the rise of more alternative
subgroups—some dangerous, some not so much. “Cult” has evolved to
describe them all.
I’ve found that “cult” has become one of those terms that can mean
something totally different depending on the context of the conversation
and the attitudes of the speaker. It can be invoked as a damning accusation
implying death and destruction, a cheeky metaphor suggesting not much
more than some matching outfits and enthusiasm, and pretty much
everything in between.
In modern discourse, someone could apply the word “cult” to a new
religion, a group of online radicals, a start-up, and a makeup brand all in the
same breath. While working at a beauty magazine a few years ago, I
promptly noticed how commonplace it was for cosmetics brands to invoke
“cult” as a marketing term to generate buzz for new product launches. A
cursory search for the word in my old work inbox yielded thousands of
results. “Take a sneak peek at the next cult phenomenon,” reads a press
release from a trendy makeup line, swearing that the new face powder from
their so-called Cult Lab will “send beauty junkies and makeup fanatics into
a frenzy.” Another pitch from a skincare company vows that their $150
“Cult Favorites Set” of CBD-infused elixirs “is more than skincare, it’s the
priceless gift of an opportunity to decompress and love oneself in order to
handle whatever life throws at them.” A priceless opportunity? To handle
anything? The promised benefits of this eye cream sound not unlike those
of a spiritual grifter.
Confusing as this panoply of “cult” definitions might sound, we seem to
be navigating it okay. Sociolinguists have found that overall, listeners are
quite savvy at making contextual inferences about the meaning and stakes
implied whenever a familiar word is used in conversation. Generally, we’re
able to infer that when we talk about the cult of Jonestown, we mean
something different from the “cult” of CBD skincare or Taylor Swift fans.
Of course, there is room for misinterpretation, as there always is with
language. But overall, most seasoned conversationalists understand that
when we describe certain fitness fiends as “cult followers,” we might be
referencing their intense, indeed religious-seeming devotion, but we’re
probably not worried that they’re going to drown in financial ruin or stop
speaking to their families (at least, not as a condition of their membership).
Regarding Swifties or SoulCyclers, “cult” may serve as more of a metaphor,
similar to how one might compare school or work to a “prison,” as a way to
describe an oppressive environment or harsh higher-ups, without raising
concerns about literal jail cells. When I sent my initial interview request to
Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford psychological anthropologist and well-known
scholar of fringe religions, she responded with “Dear Amanda, I would be
happy to talk. I do think that SoulCycle is a cult :-)”—but during our
conversation later, she clarified that the statement was more tongue-in-
cheek and something she’d never say formally. Which, of course, I already
understood. We’ll hear more from Tanya later.
With groups like SoulCycle, “cult” works to describe members’ fierce
fidelity to a cultural coterie that may very well remind us of some aspects of
a Manson-level dangerous group—the monetary and time commitment, the
conformism, and the exalted leadership (all of which certainly have the
potential to turn toxic)—but not the wholesale isolation from outsiders or
life-threatening lies and abuse. We know without needing to explicitly state
it that the possibility of death or a physical inability to leave is not on the
table.
But, like everything in life, there is no good cult/bad cult binary;
cultishness falls on a spectrum. Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor,
author of The Cult of Trump, and one of the country’s foremost cult experts,
has described an influence continuum representing groups from healthy and
constructive to unhealthy and destructive. Hassan says that groups toward
the destructive end use three kinds of deception: omission of what you need
to know, distortion to make whatever they’re saying more acceptable, and
outright lies. One of the major differences between so-called ethical cults
(Hassan references sports and music fans) and noxious ones is that an
ethical group will be up-front about what they believe in, what they want
from you, and what they expect from your membership. And leaving comes
with few, if any, serious consequences. “If you say ‘I found a better band’
or ‘I’m not into basketball anymore,’ the other people won’t threaten you,”
Hassan clarifies. “You won’t have irrational fears that you’ll go insane or be
possessed by demons.”*
Or, in the case of our former 3HO member, Tasha, turn into a
cockroach. “To my core,” Tasha answered, when I asked if she truly
believed the group’s promise that if she committed a serious offense, like
sleeping with her guru or taking her life, she’d come back as the world’s
most reviled insect. Tasha also believed that if you died in the presence of
someone holy, you’d reincarnate higher. Once, she spotted a cockroach in a
public restroom and was convinced it was a swami who’d done something
awful in a past life and was trying to come back on a higher vibration. “I
was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s trying to die around me because I am an
elevated teacher.’” Tasha shivered. When the cockroach scuttled up into the
full sink, Tasha opened the plug so it wouldn’t have the honor of drowning
in her proximity. “I freaked out and ran out of the bathroom,” she
recounted. “That was probably the pinnacle of my insanity.”
By contrast, our CrossFitter Alyssa Clarke told me that the scariest
possible outcome for her might be getting called lazy on Facebook if she
skipped a workout. Or, if she decided to quit the box and start Spinning
instead (heaven forbid), her old pals and paramours might slowly dissolve
from her life.
It is to qualify this wide gamut of cultlike communities that we’ve come
up with colloquial modifiers like “cult-followed,” “culty,” and (indeed)
“cultish.”
iii.
It’s really no coincidence that “cults” are having such a proverbial
moment. The twenty-first century has produced a climate of sociopolitical
unrest and mistrust of long-established institutions, like church,
government, Big Pharma, and big business. It’s the perfect societal recipe
for making new and unconventional groups—everything from Reddit incels
to woo-woo wellness influencers—who promise to provide answers that the
conventional ones couldn’t supply seem freshly appealing. Add the
development of social media and declining marriage rates, and culture-wide
feelings of isolation are at an all-time high. Civic engagement is at a record-
breaking low. In 2019, Forbes labeled loneliness an “epidemic.”
Human beings are really bad at loneliness. We’re not built for it. People
have been attracted to tribes of like-minded others ever since the time of
ancient humans, who communed in close-knit groups for survival. But
beyond the evolutionary advantage, community also makes us feel a
mysterious thing called happiness. Neuroscientists have found that our
brains release feel-good chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin when we
partake in transcendent bonding rituals, like group chanting and singing.
Our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors used to pack their village squares to
engage in ritualistic dances, though there was no practical need for them.
Modern citizens of countries like Denmark and Canada, whose
governments prioritize community connection (through high-quality public
transportation, neighborhood co-ops, etc.), self-report higher degrees of
satisfaction and fulfillment. All kinds of research points to the idea that
humans are social and spiritual by design. Our behavior is driven by a
desire for belonging and purpose. We’re “cultish” by nature.
This fundamental human itch for connection is touching, but when
steered in the wrong direction, it can also cause an otherwise judicious
person to do utterly irrational things. Consider this classic study: In 1951,
Swarthmore College psychologist Solomon Asch gathered together half a
dozen students to conduct a simple “vision test.” Asch showed four vertical
lines to the participants, all but one of whom were in on the experiment, and
asked them to point to the two that were the same length. There was one
obviously correct answer, which you needed zero skills other than eyesight
to figure out, but Asch found that if the first five students pointed to a
blatantly wrong answer, 75 percent of test subjects ignored their better
judgment and agreed with the majority. This ingrained fear of alienation,
this compulsion to conform, is part of what makes being part of a group feel
so right. It’s also what charismatic leaders, from 3HO’s Yogi Bhajan to
CrossFit’s Greg Glassman, have learned to channel and exploit.
It was once true that when in need of community and answers, people
defaulted to organized religion. But increasingly this is no longer the case.
Every day, more and more Americans are dropping their affiliations with
mainstream churches and scattering. The “spiritual but not religious” label
is something most of my twentysomething friends have claimed. Pew
Research data from 2019 found that four in ten millennials don’t identify
with any religious affiliation; this was up nearly 20 percentage points from
seven years prior. A 2015 Harvard Divinity School study found that young
people are still seeking “both a deep spiritual experience and a community
experience” to imbue their lives with meaning—but fewer than ever are
satisfying these desires with conventional faith.
To classify this skyrocketing demographic of religious disaffiliates,
scholars have come up with labels like the “Nones” and the “Remixed.”
The latter term was coined by Tara Isabella Burton, a theologian, reporter,
and author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.
“Remixed” describes the tendency of contemporary seekers to mix and
match beliefs and rituals from different circles (religious and secular) to
come up with a bespoke spiritual routine. Say, a meditation class in the
morning, horoscopes in the afternoon, and then ultra-Reform Friday night
Shabbat with friends.
Spiritual meaning often doesn’t involve God at all anymore. The
Harvard Divinity School study named SoulCycle and CrossFit among the
groups giving America’s youth a modern religious identity. “It gives you
what religion gives you, which is the feeling that your life matters,” Chani
Green, a twenty-six-year-old actress and die-hard SoulCycler living in Los
Angeles, told me of the exercise craze. “The cynicism we have now is
almost antihuman. We need to feel connected to something, like we’re put
on earth for a reason other than just dying. At SoulCycle, for forty-five
minutes, I feel that.”
For those who bristle at the idea of comparing workout classes to
religion, know that as tricky as it is to define “cult,” scholars have been
arguing even harder for centuries over how to classify “religion.” You
might have a feeling that Christianity is a religion, while fitness is not, but
even experts have a tough time distinguishing exactly why. I like Burton’s
way of looking at it, which is less about what religions are and more about
what religions do, which is to provide the following four things: meaning,
purpose, a sense of community, and ritual. Less and less often are seekers
finding these things at church.
Modern cultish groups also feel comforting in part because they help
alleviate the anxious mayhem of living in a world that presents almost too
many possibilities for who to be (or at least the illusion of such). I once had
a therapist tell me that flexibility without structure isn’t flexibility at all; it’s
just chaos. That’s how a lot of people’s lives have been feeling. For most of
America’s history, there were comparatively few directions a person’s
career, hobbies, place of residence, romantic relationships, diet, aesthetic—
everything—could easily go in. But the twenty-first century presents folks
(those of some privilege, that is) with a Cheesecake Factory–size menu of
decisions to make. The sheer quantity can be paralyzing, especially in an
era of radical self-creation, when there’s such pressure to craft a strong
“personal brand” at the very same time that morale and basic survival feel
more precarious for young people than they have in a long time. As our
generational lore goes, millennials’ parents told them they could grow up to
be whatever they wanted, but then that cereal aisle of endless “what ifs” and
“could bes” turned out to be so crushing, all they wanted was a guru to tell
them which to pick.
“I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want
someone to tell me what to eat,” Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s thirty-three-year-
old character confesses to her priest (the hot one) in season 2 of her Emmy-
winning series Fleabag. “What to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to,
what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to
joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for,
who to love, and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me
how to live my life.”
Following a guru who provides an identity template—from one’s
politics to one’s hairstyle—eases that chooser’s paradox. This concept can
be applied to spiritual extremists like Scientologists and 3HO members, but
also to loyalists of social media celebrities and “cult brands” like
Lululemon or Glossier. Just being able to say “I’m a Glossier girl” or “I
follow Dr. Joe Dispenza” (a dubious self-help star we’ll meet in part 6)
softens the burden and responsibility of having to make so many
independent choices about what you think and who you are. It cuts the
overwhelming number of answers you need to have down to a manageable
few. You can simply ask, “What would a Glossier girl do?” And base your
day’s decisions—your perfume, your news sources, all of it—on that
framework.
The tide of change away from mainstream establishments and toward
nontraditional groups is not at all new. It’s something we’ve seen all over
the world at several different junctures in human history. Society’s
attraction to so-called cults (both the propensity to join them and the
anthropological fascination with them) tends to thrive during periods of
broader existential questioning. Most alternative religious leaders come to
power not to exploit their followers, but instead to guide them through
social and political turbulence. Jesus of Nazareth (you may be familiar)
arose during what is said to be the most fraught time in Middle Eastern
history (a fact which speaks for itself). The violent, encroaching Roman
Empire left people searching for a nonestablishment guide who could
inspire and protect them. Fifteen hundred years later, during the
tempestuous European Renaissance, dozens of “cults” cropped up in
rebellion against the Catholic Church. In seventeenth-century India, fringe
groups grew out of the social discord that resulted from the shift to
agriculture, and then as a reaction to British imperialism.
Compared to other developed nations, the US boasts a particularly
consistent relationship with “cults,” which speaks to our brand of distinctly
American tumult. Across the world, levels of religiosity tend to be lowest in
countries with the highest standards of living (strong education levels, long
life expectancies), but the US is exceptional in that it’s both highly
developed and full of believers—even with all our “Nones” and “Remixed.”
This inconsistency can be explained in part because while citizens of other
advanced nations, like Japan and Sweden, enjoy a bevy of top-down
resources, including universal healthcare and all sorts of social safety nets,
the US is more of a free-for-all. “The Japanese and the Europeans know
their governments will come to their aid in their hour of need,” wrote Dr.
David Ludden, a language psychologist at Georgia Gwinnett College, for
Psychology Today. But America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people
feel all on their own. Generation after generation, this lack of institutional
support paves the way for alternative, supernaturally minded groups to
surge.
This pattern of American unrest was also responsible for the rise of
cultish movements throughout the 1960s and ’70s, when the Vietnam War,
the civil rights movement, and both Kennedy assassinations knocked US
citizens unsteady. At the time, spiritual practice was spiking, but the overt
reign of traditional Protestantism was declining, so new movements arose to
quench that cultural thirst. These included everything from Christian
offshoots like Jews for Jesus and the Children of God to Eastern-derived
fellowships like 3HO and Shambhala Buddhism to pagan groups like the
Covenant of the Goddess and the Church of Aphrodite to sci-fi-esque ones
like Scientology and Heaven’s Gate. Some scholars now refer to this era as
the Fourth Great Awakening. (The first three were a string of zealous
evangelical revivals that whirred through the American Northeast during
the 1700s and 1800s.)
Different from the earlier Protestant awakenings, the fourth was
populated by seekers looking toward the East and the occult to inspire
individualistic quests for enlightenment. Just like twenty-first-century “cult
followers,” these seekers were mostly young, countercultural, politically
divergent types who felt the powers that be had failed them. If you
subscribe to an astrology app or have ever attended a music festival, odds
are that in the 1970s, you’d have brushed up against a “cult” of some kind.
Ultimately, the needs for identity, purpose, and belonging have existed
for a very long time, and cultish groups have always sprung up during
cultural limbos when these needs have gone sorely unmet. What’s new is
that in this internet-ruled age, when a guru can be godless, when the barrier
to entry is as low as a double-tap, and when folks who hold alternative
beliefs are able to find one another more easily than ever, it only makes
sense that secular cults—from obsessed workout studios to start-ups that
put the “cult” in “company culture”—would start sprouting like dandelions.
For good or for ill, there is now a cult for everyone.
iv.
A couple of years ago, amid a conversation about my decision in college
to quit the competitive (and quite cultish) theater program at my university
in favor of a linguistics major, my mother told me that my change of heart
really came as no surprise to her since she’d always considered me
profoundly “un-culty.” I chose to take this as a compliment, since I
definitely wouldn’t want to be characterized the opposite way, but it also
didn’t fully digest as praise. That’s because, juxtaposed with the dark
elements, there’s a certain sexiness surrounding cults—the unconventional
aspect, the mysticism, the communal intimacy. In this way, the word has
almost come full circle.
“Cult” hasn’t always carried ominous undertones. The earliest version
of the term can be found in writings from the seventeenth century, when the
cult label was much more innocent. Back then, it simply meant “homage
paid to divinity,” or offerings made to win over the gods. The words
“culture” and “cultivation,” derived from the same Latin verb, cultus, are
“cult”’s close morphological cousins.
The word evolved in the early nineteenth century, a time of
experimental religious brouhaha in the United States. The American
colonies, which were founded upon the freedom to practice new religions,
gained a reputation as a safe haven where eccentric believers could get as
freaky as they liked. This spiritual freedom opened the door for a stampede
of alternative social and political groups, too. During the mid-1800s, well
over one hundred small ideological cliques formed and collapsed. When the
French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville came to visit the US in the
1830s, he was astonished by how “Americans of all ages, all stations in life,
and all types of disposition [were] forever forming associations.” “Cults” of
the time included groups like the Oneida Community, a camp of
polyamorous communists in upstate New York (sounds fun); the Harmony
Society, an egalitarian fellowship of science lovers in Indiana (how lovely);
and (my favorite) a short-lived vegan farming cult in Massachusetts called
Fruitlands, which was founded by philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, an
abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and father of Little Women author
Louisa May Alcott. Back then, “cult” merely served as a sort of churchly
classification, alongside “religion” and “sect.” The word denoted something
new or unorthodox, but not necessarily nefarious.
The term started gaining its darker reputation toward the start of the
Fourth Great Awakening. That’s when the emergence of so many
nonconformist spiritual groups spooked old-school conservatives and
Christians. “Cults” soon became associated with charlatans, quacks, and
heretical kooks. But they still weren’t considered much of a societal threat
or criminal priority . . . not until the Manson Family murders of 1969,
followed by the Jonestown massacre of 1978 (which we’ll investigate in
part 2). After that, the word “cult” became a symbol of fear.
The grisly death of over nine hundred people at Jonestown, the largest
number of American civilian casualties prior to 9/11, sent the whole country
into cult delirium. Some readers may recall the subsequent “Satanic Panic,”
a period in the ’80s defined by widespread paranoia that Satan-worshipping
child abusers were terrorizing wholesome American neighborhoods. As
sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of the Cults, “The
unprecedented media exposure given Jonestown . . . alerted Americans to
the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot.”
Then, as these things tend to go, as soon as cults became frightening,
they also became cool. Seventies pop culture didn’t wait long to birth terms
like “cult film” and “cult classic,” which described the up-and-coming
genre of underground indie movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead came to be known for their
peripatetic “cult followings.”
A generation or two after the Fourth Great Awakening, the era began to
take on a nostalgic cool factor among cult-curious youth. Fringe groups
from the ’70s now boast a sort of perversely stylish vintage cachet. At this
point, being obsessed with the Manson Family is akin to having an
extensive collection of hippie-era vinyl and band tees. At an LA salon the
other week, I eavesdropped on a woman telling her stylist that she was
going for a “Manson girl” hair look: overgrown, brunette, middle-parted. A
twentysomething acquaintance of mine recently hosted a cult-themed
birthday party in New York’s Hudson Valley—the site of numerous
historical “cults” (including The Family,* NXIVM, and countless witches),
as well as the Woodstock music festival. The dress code? All white. Filtered
photographs of guests sporting ivory slips and glassy-eyed “oops, I didn’t
know I was haunted” expressions flooded my Instagram feed.
Over the decades, the word “cult” has become so sensationalized, so
romanticized, that most experts I spoke to don’t even use it anymore. Their
stance is that the meaning of “cult” is too broad and subjective to be useful,
at least in academic literature. As recently as the 1990s, scholars had no
problem tossing around the term to describe any group “considered by
many to be deviant.” But it doesn’t take a social scientist to see the bias
built into that categorization.
A few scholars have tried to get more precise and identify specific
“cult” criteria: charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and
financial exploitation, an us-versus-them mentality toward nonmembers,
and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy. Stephen Kent, a sociology
professor at the University of Alberta, adds that “cult” has typically been
applied to groups that have some degree of supernatural beliefs, though that
isn’t always the case. (Angels and demons don’t usually make their way
into, say, cosmetics pyramid schemes. Except when they do . . . more on
that in part 4.) But Kent says the result of all these institutions is the same: a
power imbalance built on members’ devotion, hero worship, and absolute
trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable
leaders. The glue that keeps this trust intact is members’ belief that their
leaders have a rare access to transcendent wisdom, which allows them to
exercise control over their systems of rewards and punishments, both here
on earth and in the afterlife. Based on my conversations, these qualities
seem to encapsulate what many everyday folks view as a “real cult” or “the
academic definition of a cult.”
But as it turns out, “cult” doesn’t have an official academic definition.
“Because it’s inherently pejorative,” Rebecca Moore, a religion professor at
San Diego State University, clarified during a phone interview. “It’s simply
used to describe groups we don’t like.” Moore comes to the subject of cults
from a unique place: Her two sisters were among those who perished in the
Jonestown massacre; in fact, Jim Jones enlisted them to help pull off the
event. But Moore told me she doesn’t use the word “cult” in earnest
because it’s become inarguably judgment-laden. “As soon as someone says
it, we know as readers, listeners, or individuals exactly what we should
think about that particular group,” she explained.
Equally, “brainwashing” is a term that is tossed around incessantly by
the media, but that almost every expert I consulted for this book either
avoids or rejects. “We don’t say that soldiers are brainwashed to kill other
people; that’s basic training,” offers Moore. “We don’t say that fraternity
members are brainwashed to haze* their [pledges]; that’s peer pressure.”
Most of us tend to take “brainwashing” literally, imagining that some
neurological rewiring occurs during cult indoctrinations. But brainwashing
is a metaphor. There is nothing objective about it.
Moore would be the perfect candidate to believe in literal brainwashing,
considering her two sisters’ role in the Jonestown tragedy. But she still
refutes the concept because, for one, it disregards people’s very real ability
to think for themselves. Human beings are not helpless drones whose
decision-making skills are so fragile that they can be wiped clean at any
time. If brainwashing were real, says Moore, “we would expect to see many
more dangerous people running around, planning to carry out reprehensible
schemes.” Simply put, you cannot force someone to believe something they
absolutely do not on any level want to believe by using some set of evil
techniques to “wash” their brain.
Secondly, Moore argues, brainwashing presents an untestable
hypothesis. For a theory to meet the standard criteria of the scientific
method, it has to be controvertible; that is, it must be possible to prove the
thing false. (For example, as soon as objects start traveling faster than the
speed of light, we’ll know that Einstein got his Theory of Special Relativity
wrong.) But you can’t prove that brainwashing doesn’t exist. The minute
you say someone is “brainwashed,” the conversation ends there. No room is
left to explore what might actually be motivating the person’s behavior—
which, as it turns out, is a much more interesting question.
When tossed around to describe everyone from a political candidate’s
supporters to militant vegans, the terms “cult” and “brainwashing” acquire a
sort of armchair-therapist éclat. We all love a chance to feel psychologically
and morally superior without having to think about why, and calling a
whole bunch of people “brainwashed cult followers” does just that.
This negative bias is detrimental because not all “cults” are depraved or
perilous. Statistically, in fact, few of them are. Barker (our London School
of Economics sociologist) says that out of the thousand-plus alternative
groups she’s documented that have been or could be described as “cults,”
the vast majority have not been involved with criminal activity of any kind.
Moore and Barker note that fringe communities only gain publicity when
they do something awful, like Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown. (And even
those groups didn’t set out with murder and mayhem in mind. After all,
Jonestown started out as an integrationist church. Things escalated as Jim
Jones grew hungrier for power, but most “cults” never spiral as
catastrophically as his did.) A feedback loop of scandal is created: Only the
most destructive cults gain attention, so we come to think of all cults as
destructive, and we simultaneously only recognize the destructive ones as
cults, so those gain more attention, reinforcing their negative reputation,
and so on ad infinitum.
Equally troubling is the fact that the word “cult” has so frequently been
used as permission to trash religions that society just doesn’t approve of. So
many of today’s longest-standing religious denominations (Catholics,
Baptists, Mormons, Quakers, Jews, and most Native American religions, to
name a few) were once considered unholy blasphemies in the United States
—and this was a nation founded on religious freedom. Today, American
alternative religions (oppressive and not), from Jehovah’s Witnesses to
Wiccans, are widely regarded as “cults.” The Chinese government
insistently decries the cultish evils of new religion Falun Gong, despite its
peaceful tenets, which include patience and compassion through meditation.
Barker has noted that official reports out of majority-Catholic Belgium
condemn the Quakers (just about the chillest religion ever) as a “cult” (or
secte actually, as the word culte in French has held on to its neutral
connotations).
Throughout the world, cultural normativity still has so much to do with
a religious group’s perceived legitimacy . . . no matter if its teachings are
any weirder or more harmful than a better-established group. After all, what
major spiritual leader doesn’t have some trace of blood on their hands? As
the religion scholar Reza Aslan famously stated, “The biggest joke in
religious studies is that cult + time = religion.”
In the US, Mormonism and Catholicism have been around long enough
that they’ve been given our stamp of approval. Having earned the status of
religion, they enjoy a certain amount of common respect and, importantly,
protection under the Constitution’s First Amendment. Because of this
protection variable, labeling something a “cult” becomes not just a value
judgment, but an arbiter of real, life-or-death consequences. To quote
Megan Goodwin, a researcher of American alternative religions at
Northeastern University, “The political ramifications of identifying
something as a cult are real and often violent.”
What do these ramifications look like? Dig no deeper than Jonestown.
Once the press identified Jonestown’s victims as “cultists,” they were
instantly relegated to a subclass of human. “This made it easier for the
public to distance themselves from the tragedy and its victims, dismissing
them as weak, gullible, unsuited to life, and unworthy of postmortem
respect,” wrote Laura Elizabeth Woollett, author of the Jonestown-inspired
novel Beautiful Revolutionary. “Bodies weren’t autopsied. Families were
denied the timely return of their relatives’ remains.”
Perhaps the most significant fiasco that resulted from demonizing “cult
followers” was the case of the Branch Davidians—the victims of the
notorious Waco siege of 1993. Founded in 1959, the Branch Davidians
were a religious movement descended from the Seventh-day Adventist
Church. At its peak in the early 1990s, the group had about one hundred
members, who lived together on a settlement in Waco, Texas, preparing for
the Second Coming of Jesus Christ under the abusive governance of David
Koresh, who claimed to be a prophet (as solipsistic new religious leaders
often do). Reasonably perturbed and in urgent need of help, followers’
families tipped off the FBI, who, in February 1993, seized the Branch
Davidian compound. Several dozen agents arrived, armed with rifles, tanks,
and tear gas, to “save” the “brainwashed cult followers.” But the invasion
didn’t go to plan. Instead, it led to a fifty-one-day standoff, which ended
only after a few hundred more FBI agents showed up and used tear gas to
flush their targets out of hiding. In the mayhem, a fire broke out, resulting
in the deaths of nearly eighty Branch Davidians.
Koresh was not innocent in all this. He was maniacal and violent (in
fact, he may have lit the fatal flame), and his stubbornness was part of what
led to so many casualties. But so was the fear surrounding the word “cult.”
If the FBI had applied such excessive violence to a more socially accepted
religion, one that benefited from the First Amendment safeguard, there
likely would have been much more of an uproar. Their attack on the Branch
Davidian base, by contrast, was both legally sanctioned and socially
condoned. “Religion is a constitutionally protected category . . . and the
identification of Waco’s Branch Davidians as a cult places them outside the
protections of the state,” explains Catherine Wessinger, a religion scholar at
Loyola University in New Orleans. The FBI may have gone to “save” the
Branch Davidians, but when they killed them instead, few Americans cared,
because they weren’t a church—they were a “cult.” Alas, the semantics of
sanctimony.
In a classic 1999 study, the famous Stanford psychologist Albert
Bandura revealed that when human subjects were labeled with
dehumanizing language such as “animals,” participants were more willing
to harm them by administering electric shocks. It seems that the “cult” label
can serve a similar function. This is not to say that some groups that have
been or could be called cults aren’t hazardous; certainly, plenty of them are.
Instead, because the word “cult” is so emotionally charged and up for
interpretation, the label itself does not provide enough information for us to
determine if a group is dangerous. We have to look more carefully. We have
to be more specific.
In an attempt to find a less judgy way to discuss nonmainstream
spiritual communities, many scholars have used neutral-sounding labels like
“new religious movements,” “emergent religions,” and “marginalized
religions.” But while these phrases work in an academic context, I find they
don’t quite capture the CrossFits, multilevel marketing companies, college
theater programs, and other hard-to-categorize points along the influence
continuum. We need a more versatile way to talk about communities that
are cult-like in one way or another but not necessarily connected to the
supernatural. Which is why I like the word “cultish.”
v.
I grew up entranced by all things “cult,” mostly because of my father:
As a kid, he was forced to join one. In 1969, when my dad, Craig Montell,
was fourteen, his absentee father and stepmother decided they wanted in on
the blossoming countercultural movement. So they moved young Craig and
his two toddler-age half sisters onto a remote Socialist commune outside
San Francisco called Synanon. In the late 1950s, Synanon started as a
rehabilitation center for hard-drug users, labeled “dope fiends,” but later
extended to accommodate non-drug-addicted “lifestylers.” In Synanon,
children lived in barracks miles away from their parents, and no one was
allowed to work or go to school on the outside. Some members were forced
to shave their heads; many married couples were separated and assigned
new partners. But everyone on the Synanon settlement, no exceptions, had
to play “the Game.”
The Game was a ritualistic activity where every evening, members were
divided into small circles and subjected to hours of vicious personal
criticism by their peers. This practice was the centerpiece of Synanon; in
fact, life there was divided into two semantic categories: in the Game and
out of the Game. These confrontations were presented as group therapy, but
really, they were a form of social control. There was nothing fun about the
Game, which could be hostile or humiliating, yet it was referred to as
something you “played.” It turns out that this type of extreme “truth-telling”
activity is not uncommon in cultish groups; Jim Jones hosted similar events
called Family Meetings or Catharsis Meetings, where followers would all
gather in the Mother Church on Wednesday nights. During these meetings,
anyone who had offended the group in some way was called to the Floor so
their family and friends could malign them to prove their greater loyalty to
the Cause. (More on all that in part 2.)
I cut my teeth on Synanon tales from my father, who escaped at
seventeen and went on to become a prolific neuroscientist. Now his very
job is to ask hard questions and seek proof at every turn. My dad was
always so generous with his storytelling, indulging my wide-eyed curiosity
by repeating the same stories of Synanon’s dismal living quarters and
conformist milieu, of the biologist he met there who tasked him with
running the commune’s medical lab at age fifteen. While his peers outside
Synanon were fretting over puppy-love squabbles and SAT prep, my dad
was culturing followers’ throat swabs and testing food handlers’ fingertips
for tuberculosis microbes. The lab was a sanctuary for my dad, a rare space
on Synanon’s grounds where the rules of empirical logic applied.
Paradoxically, it’s where he found his love of science. Hungry for an
education outside the commune’s closed system—and desperate for a
legitimate diploma that would allow him to attend college—when he wasn’t
in a white coat (or playing the Game) he was sneaking off the settlement to
attend an accredited high school in San Francisco, the only Synanon child
to do so. He stayed quiet, flew under the radar, and privately interrogated
everything.
Even when I was a little kid, what always gripped me most about my
dad’s Synanon stories was the group’s special language—terms like “in the
Game” and “out of the Game,” “love match” (meaning Synanon marriages),
“act as if” (an imperative never to question Synanon’s protocols, to simply
“act as if” you agreed until you did), “demonstrators” and “PODs” (parents
on duty, the rotation of adults randomly selected to chaperone the children’s
“school” and barracks), and so many more. This curious lingo was the
clearest window into that world.
As the daughter of scientists, I figure some combination of nature,
nurture, and Synanon stories caused me to become a rather incredulous
person, and since early childhood, I have always been keenly sensitive to
cultish-sounding rhetoric—but also beguiled by its power. In middle school,
my best friend’s mother was a born-again Christian, and I’d sometimes
secretly skip Hebrew school on Sundays to accompany the family to their
evangelical megachurch. Nothing enraptured me more than the way these
churchgoers spoke—how, upon setting foot in the building, everyone
slipped into a dialect of “evangelicalese.” It wasn’t King James Bible
English; it was modern and very distinct. I started using their glossary of
buzzwords whenever I attended services, just to see if it affected how the
congregants treated me. I picked up phrases like “on my heart” (a synonym
for “on my mind”), “love up on someone” (to show someone love), “in the
word” (reading the Bible), “Father of Lies” (Satan, the evil that “governs
the world”), and “convicted” (to be divinely moved to do something). It
was like the code language of an exclusive clubhouse. Though these special
terms didn’t communicate anything that couldn’t be said in plain English,
using them in the right way at the right time was like a key unlocking the
group’s acceptance. Immediately, I was perceived as an insider. The
language was a password, a disguise, a truth serum. It was so powerful.
Creating special language to influence people’s behavior and beliefs is
so effective in part simply because speech is the first thing we’re willing to
change about ourselves . . . and also the last thing we let go. Unlike shaving
your head, relocating to a commune, or even changing your clothes,
adopting new terminology is instant and (seemingly) commitment-free.
Let’s say you show up to a spiritual meeting out of curiosity, and the host
starts off by asking the group to repeat a chant. Odds are, you do it. Maybe
it feels odd and peer pressure–y at first, but they didn’t ask you to fork over
your life savings or kill anyone. How much damage can it do? Cultish
language works so efficiently (and invisibly) to mold our worldview in the
shape of the guru’s that once it’s embedded, it sticks. After you grow your
hair out, move back home, delete the app, whatever it is, the special
vocabulary is still there. In part 2 of this book, we’ll meet a man named
Frank Lyford, a survivor of the 1990s “suicide cult” Heaven’s Gate, who,
twenty-five years after defecting and disowning its belief system, still calls
his two former leaders by their monastic names, Ti and Do; refers to the
group as “the classroom”; and describes its members’ haunting fate with the
euphemism “leaving Earth,” just as he was taught to do over two decades
ago.
The idea to write this book occurred to me after my best friend from
college decided to quit drinking and go to Alcoholics Anonymous. She
lived three thousand miles away from me at the time, so I only saw her a
few times a year, and from afar, I couldn’t tell how committed she was to
this no-drinking thing, or really what to make of it. That is, until the first
time I went to visit her after she got sober. That night, we were having
trouble figuring out dinner plans, when the following sentence exited her
mouth: “I’ve been HALTing all day, I caught a resentment at work, but
trying not to future-trip. Ugh, let’s just focus on dinner: First things first, as
they say!”
I must have looked at her as if she had three heads. “HALT”? “Future-
trip”? “Caught a resentment”? What on earth was she saying?* Three
months in AA, and this person who was so close to me I could’ve
accurately distinguished the meanings of her different exhalations was
suddenly speaking a foreign language. Instantly, I had a heuristic reaction—
it was the same instinct I felt looking at those old photos of Tasha Samar in
the desert; the same response my dad had the day he first stepped onto
Synanon’s grounds. A Jonestown survivor once told me, “They say that a
cult is like pornography. You know it when you see it.” Or, if you’re like
me, you know it when you hear it. The exclusive language was the biggest
clue. AA wasn’t Synanon, of course; it was changing my friend’s life for
the better. But its conquest of her vocabulary was impossible to unhear.
Instincts aren’t social science, though—and in truth, I didn’t actually
“know” AA was a “cult.” But I had a strong inkling that there was
something mighty and mysterious going on there. I had to look deeper. I
had to understand: How did the group’s language take such rapid hold of
my friend? How does language work, for better and for worse, to make
people submerge themselves in zealous ideological groups with unchecked
leaders? How does it keep them in the whirlpool?
I began this project out of the perverse craving for cult campfire tales
that so many of us possess. But it quickly became clear that learning about
the connections across language, power, community, and belief could
legitimately help us understand what motivates people’s fanatical behaviors
during this ever-restless era—a time when we find multilevel marketing
scams masquerading as feminist start-ups, phony shamans ballyhooing bad
health advice, online hate groups radicalizing new members, and kids
sending each other literal death threats in defense of their favorite brands.
Chani, the twenty-six-year-old SoulCycler, told me she once saw one
teenager pull a weapon on another over the last pair of sneakers at an LA
hypebeast sample sale. “The next Crusades will be not religious but
consumerist,” she suggested. Uber vs. Lyft. Amazon vs. Amazon
boycotters. TikTok vs. Instagram. Tara Isabella Burton put it well when she
said, “If the boundaries between cult and religion are already slippery, those
between religion and culture are more porous still.”
The haunting, beautiful, stomach-twisting truth is that no matter how
cult-phobic you fancy yourself, our participation in things is what defines
us. Whether you were born into a family of Pentecostals who speak in
tongues, left home at eighteen to join the Kundalini yogis, got dragged into
a soul-sucking start-up right out of college, became an AA regular last year,
or just five seconds ago clicked a targeted ad promoting not just a skincare
product but the “priceless opportunity” to become “part of a movement,”
group affiliations—which can have profound, even eternal significance—
make up the scaffolding upon which we build our lives. It doesn’t take
someone broken or disturbed to crave that structure. Again, we’re wired to.
And what we often overlook is that the material with which that scaffolding
is built, the very material that fabricates our reality, is language. “We have
always used language to explain what we already knew,” wrote English
scholar Gary Eberle in his 2007 book Dangerous Words, “but, more
importantly, we have also used it to reach toward what we did not yet know
or understand.” With words, we breathe reality into being.
A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that
language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we
are. That’s because speech itself has the capacity to consummate actions,
thus exhibiting a level of intrinsic power. (The plainest examples of
performative language would be making a promise, performing a wedding
ceremony, or pronouncing a legal sentence.) When repeated over and over
again, speech has meaningful, consequential power to construct and
constrain our reality. Ideally, most people’s understandings of reality are
shared, and grounded in logic. But to enmesh in a community that uses
linguistic rituals—chants, prayers, turns of phrase—to reshape that “culture
of shared understanding” Eileen Barker spoke of can draw us away from
the real world. Without us even noticing, our very understanding of
ourselves and what we believe to be true becomes bound up with the group.
With the leader. All because of language.
This book will explore the wide spectrum of cults and their uncanny
lexicons, starting with the most famously blatantly dreadful ones and
working its way to communities so seemingly innocuous, we might not
even notice how cultish they are. In order to keep the scope of these stories
manageable (because goodness knows I could spend my whole life
interviewing people about “cults” of all kinds), we’re going to focus mainly
on American groups. Each part of the book will focus on a different
category of “cult,” all the while exploring the cultish rhetoric that imbues
our everyday lives: Part 2 is dedicated to notorious “suicide cults” like
Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate; part 3 explores controversial religions like
Scientology and Children of God; part 4 is about multilevel marketing
companies (MLMs); part 5 covers “cult fitness” studios; and part 6 delves
into social media gurus.
The words we hear and use every day can provide clues to help us
determine which groups are healthy, which are toxic, and which are a little
bit of both—and to what extent we wish to engage with them. Within these
pages lies an adventure into the curious (and curiously familiar) language of
Cultish.
So, in the words of many a cult leader: Come along. Follow me . . .
i.
“Drinking the Kool-Aid.”
This is a phrase you know. Having taken a seat at the table of everyday
idioms, it’s probably come up on at least a few dozen occasions over the
course of your English-speaking life. The last time I overheard the
expression was only about a week ago, as I caught someone casually
describe their allegiance to Sweetgreen, the trendy chopped-salad chain: “I
guess I’ve just drunk the Kool-Aid,” they said with a side smile, taking their
quinoa to go.
I, too, once uttered this remark just as reflexively as any other familiar
stock saying—“speak of the devil,” “hit the nail on the head,” “can’t judge
a book by its cover.” But that was before I knew the stories.
Today, “drinking the Kool-Aid” is most often used to describe someone
mindlessly following a majority, or as shorthand for questioning their
sanity. In 2012, Forbes christened it a “top annoying cliché” used by
business leaders. Bill O’Reilly has invoked the saying to write off his critics
(“The Kool-Aid people are going nuts,” he’s told listeners). I’ve even found
it in contexts as glib and self-deprecating as “Yeah, I finally bought a
Peloton. I guess I drank the Kool-Aid!” or “He’s obsessed with Radiohead
—he drank the Kool-Aid back in the nineties” (and then of course the
Sweetgreen thing).
Most speakers use the idiom without batting an eye, but there are a
select few who grasp its gravity. “One of the most vile phrases in the
English language” is how seventy-one-year-old Tim Carter describes it. Tim
told me this on a long call from San Francisco, talking a mile a minute, as if
he couldn’t get his repugnance out fast enough. “People have no idea what
they’re even saying.” Decades ago, an old neighbor of Tim’s named Odell
Rhodes voiced the same sentiment in an exposé for the Washington Post:
“The whole ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ saying is so odious . . . so completely
wrong.” Teri Buford O’Shea, a sixty-seven-year-old poet who once knew
both Tim and Odell, made a similar comment on the phrase: “It makes me
shudder.”
Tim, Odell, and Teri have a unique perspective on “drinking the Kool-
Aid,” because in the 1970s, they were all members of the Peoples Temple.
The group went by many names—a congregation, a movement, a lifestyle,
an agricultural project, an experiment, a Promised Land. This was not
unintentional. Shadowy groups are expert rebranders, benefiting from the
confusion, distraction, and secrecy a revolving door of puzzling new labels
can incite.
The Peoples Temple started as a racially integrated church in
Indianapolis in the 1950s. A decade later, it moved to Northern California,
where it evolved to become more of a progressive “socio-political
movement.” That’s according to the FBI reports. But it wasn’t until 1974,
when the Peoples Temple relocated to a remote stretch of land in South
America, that it became the “cult” known as Jonestown.
Mythologized by many but understood by few, Jonestown was an arid
3,800-acre settlement in northwestern Guyana that housed about a thousand
occupants at the time of its denouement in 1978. The place was named after
its inglorious leader, Jim Jones. He also went by many names. In
Indianapolis, when the group still had religious leanings, followers
addressed Jones as “God” or “Father” (“Father’s Day” was celebrated on
May 13, his birthday). By the time the group reached Guyana and
secularized, his moniker evolved to the cozier “Dad.” Eventually, members
also started calling him “the Office” by way of metonymy, like how a king
might be referred to as “the crown.” And in his later years, Jones insisted on
the courtly title “Founder-Leader.”
Jones moved his followers from Redwood City, California, to Guyana,
promising a Socialist paradise outside the evils of what he saw as an
encroaching fascist apocalypse in the United States. Grainy film prints of
the place depict a veritable Eden—children of all races blissfully play as
their parents braid each other’s hair and befriend the neighboring wildlife.
In one image, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Maria Katsaris (one of
Jones’s lovers and a member of his innermost circle) grins while placing a
genial index finger on the tip of a toucan’s beak. Scrap the historical
context, and it looks like the sort of humble, off-the-grid elysium where I
could’ve seen any number of my progressive LA pals going to escape the
Trump administration. A pet toucan sounds nice.
Today, most Americans have at least heard of Jonestown, if not the
name, then the iconography: a commune in the jungle, a manic preacher,
poisoned punch, corpses piled in the grass. Jonestown is best known for the
mass murder-suicide of over nine hundred followers on November 18,
1978. Most of the victims, including more than three hundred children, met
their fate after consuming a lethal concoction of cyanide and trace amounts
of tranquilizers, which were mixed into vats of grape-flavored juice made
from the powdered fruit concentrate Flavor Aid. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is
a metaphor derived from this tragedy. Our culture erroneously remembers
the elixir as Kool-Aid, not Flavor Aid, due to the former’s status as a
genericized trademark (like how some people call all tissues “Kleenex,”
even though there are also Puffs and Angel Soft). But Jonestownians died
by the cheaper shelf-brand version, which they ingested—most orally, some
by injection, and many against their will—under extreme pressure from
Jones, who claimed “revolutionary suicide” was their only option for
“protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”
Folks didn’t go to Guyana to die a bizarre death; they went in search of
a better life: to try Socialism on for size, or because their churches back
home were failing, or to evade the racist American police (sound familiar?).
With the Promised Land, Jim Jones guaranteed a solution for every walk of
life—and with all the right words delivered just so, people had reason to
believe him.
Jones, whose character alone has been the subject of several dozen
books, made famous what are now recognized as all the classic red flags of
a dangerous guru: On the surface, he seemed a prophetic political
revolutionary, but underneath, he was a maniacal, lying, paranoid narcissist.
As the story tends to go, his devotees didn’t find that out until it was too
late. In the beginning, more than one survivor swore to me, there seemed
nothing not to love.
Born and raised in Indiana, Jim Jones was a promising new pastor in his
twenties when he created his first congregation there. A rock-ribbed
integrationist, he and his wife were the first white couple in the state to
adopt a Black child, and they soon filled their home with many other non-
white kids. Jones called his household the “Rainbow Family,” which sent a
message that he walked the walk of racial justice not only at church, but in
his personal life, too.
Jones’s image wasn’t just progressive and pious, though. He was
handsome, too—an Elvis doppelgänger in his youth. Personally, I don’t see
the appeal (unpopular opinion, I guess, but Jones’s blocky, cartoonish
features have always reminded me a little of Biff Tannen, the bully from
Back to the Future). I suppose deranged murderers might just not be my
type, though I know that hybristophilia, an attraction to brutish criminals, is
a very real thing. Jones, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson all had groupies.
Even the famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the guy known for the
Stanford Prison Experiment, openly commented on Jones’s irresistible
“sexual appeal.”
But sex appeal isn’t just looks—it’s an ability to craft the illusion of
intimacy between yourself and your fans. That’s what Jonestown expats
remember. Each one I spoke to rhapsodized about the man’s impossible
charm, his knack for seamlessly relating to anyone, from white upper-
middle-class bohemians to Black folks active in the church. With
twentysomething San Francisco progressives, Jones waxed Socialist,
seducing them with professorial Nietzsche quotes; with older Pentecostals,
he used Bible verses and the familiar timbre of a reverend. Multiple
survivors told me that the first time they spoke to Jones, it felt as if he had
known them their whole lives—that he “spoke their language.” This kind of
intense validation later traded for control is what some social scientists term
“love-bombing.”
“He appealed to anyone on any level at any time,” explained Leslie
Wagner Wilson, a public speaker, memoirist, and survivor of Jonestown.
“He could quote scripture and turn around and preach socialism.” Leslie
didn’t just live to tell the tale of Jonestown—the morning of the massacre,
she escaped by darting into the jungle. At just twenty-two, a young Black
woman with round glasses and cherubic cheeks, Leslie trekked thirty miles
through the gnarled vegetation, her three-year-old son strapped to her back
with a bedsheet. Her mother, sister, brother, and husband did not survive.
Flashback nine years: Leslie was in junior high when her mother, who
was raising a house full of kids on her own and searching for support,
joined the Peoples Temple in Redwood City. Since she was thirteen years
old, the Peoples Temple was Leslie’s whole world. Jones was Father and
Dad to her. He called her his “little Angela Davis.” Talk about love-
bombing: For the teenager, whose identity was still forming, a comparison
to the radical activist and role model strengthened her trust in Jones. Every
time he used the nickname, it reinforced that commitment. “Ever the savvy
showman, Jones successfully manipulated the revolutionary aspirations of
young African Americans reeling from the fading promise of the Black
Power movement,” wrote Sikivu Hutchinson, feminist author of White
Nights, Black Paradise. Naturally, Leslie wanted to believe she was the
next Angela Davis. She was understandably motivated to think she could
offer her community that kind of hope.
In this way, it wasn’t Jones’s looks, family optics, or even his ideas that
hooked people; it was his way with words. “The way that he spoke—he was
a great orator,” said Leslie. “It moved you, it inspired you. . . . I was just
enthralled.” Jones didn’t convince all the people Leslie loved—bright,
family-oriented folks who objectively had nothing in common with the guy
—to follow him to the ends of the earth using some form of cryptic mind
magic. “It was with language,” another Jonestown survivor told me
fervently. “That’s how he gained and kept control.”
Boasting the intonation and passion of a Baptist preacher, the complex
theorizings of an Aristotelian philosopher, the folksy wit of a countryside
fabler, and the ferocious zeal of a demented tyrant, Jim Jones was a
linguistic chameleon who possessed a monster arsenal of shrewd rhetorical
strategies, which he wielded to attract and condition followers of all stripes.
This is what the most cunning cultish leaders do: Instead of sticking to one
unchanging lexis to represent a unified doctrine, they customize their
language according to the individual in front of them. Known for quotes
like “Socialism is older than the Bible by far” and “A capitalist mentality
[is] the lowest vibration at which one could operate in this already dense
plane of existence,” Jones’s Frankensteinian oratory often referenced
political theory and metaphysics in the same breath. “His vocabulary could
change quickly from being rather backwoods and homey to being quite
intellectual,” recalled Garry Lambrev, a poet and Peoples Temple vet from
back in its Redwood City days. “He had an enormous vocabulary. He read
an unbelievable amount. I don’t know where he found the time.”
A quick-changing vocabulary used for social capital: A linguist might
tell you Jones was a sly practitioner of code-switching, or fluidly alternating
between multiple language varieties. Among the nondiabolical, code-
switching is an efficient (and usually unconscious) way of using every
linguistic resource at your disposal to handle a verbal exchange most
effectively. One might code-switch between dialects or languages from one
setting to the next, or even within a single conversation, to express a
specific mood, emphasize a statement, adapt to a social convention, or
communicate a certain identity. The stakes of code-switching can be as high
as ensuring respect and even survival, as is the case for speakers of certain
marginalized ethnolects, like African American English, who learn to shift
to “Standard English” in settings where they could be judged or persecuted
otherwise. And then, in a kind of opposite way, code-switching can be used
to connivingly gain trust. This was Jim Jones’s specialty. Like a
Machiavellian version of my twelve-year-old self slipping into
evangelicalese at my friend’s megachurch, Jones learned how to meet each
follower on their linguistic level, which sent an instant signal that he
understood them and their backgrounds uniquely.
Starting early in life, Jones carefully studied the speech stylings of
compelling populist pastors and politicians from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and Father Divine (a Black spiritual leader and mentor to Jones) to Hitler.
He stole the best bits and added his own Jonesian twist. He learned to
modulate his voice in the manner of a Pentecostal preacher and picked up
phrases that white people weren’t supposed to know . . . like “Jack White
preachers,” an in-group label used in some Black church groups to criticize
scammy white televangelists. By the time the Peoples Temple reached
Guyana, it had become about three-quarters African American, although
Jones’s inner circle was almost entirely young white women (like Maria
Katsaris), which is a pattern in power abuse: an older man at the top, and by
his side, a clique of fair-skinned twenty- and thirtysomething women who
acquiesce to exchanging their whiteness and sexuality for a few more grains
of power.
By invoking politicized buzzwords—like “bourgeois bitches,” a term
Jones coined to forbid white followers from attending certain meetings, and
“churchianity,” a portmanteau condemning phony white Christians—Jones
created the illusion that the Black majority had more privilege than they
did. “He would visit Black churches, stand at the back door, and look at the
preacher, who had mesmerized a crowd of a hundred people,” recalled
Jonestown survivor Laura Johnston Kohl. At seventy-two years old, Laura
sports a fair sloping face and inch-long silver hair, but the same hopeful
eyes that met Jim Jones’s five decades ago and thought, this man is onto
something great. In retrospect, of course, she sees him more clearly: “Jim
didn’t care about religion. He studied those people because he thought,
‘That’s the job I want and more.’”
Laura Johnston Kohl found the Peoples Temple as a twenty-two-year-
old civil rights demonstrator. Born to a progressive, politically active single
mom in a still-segregated DC suburb, she grew up witnessing racial
injustice all around her. Laura dropped out of college in 1968 and moved to
California to pursue activism full-time. “I wanted to live in a community
that was a mix of all races, all financial levels, all economic levels. I joined
Peoples Temple for the political part,” Laura told me on one of our many
phone calls. She longed for societal equality, and was down to get
experimental to find it. Jones’s plans for a rural settlement overseas made
her pupils dilate with possibility. She packed a single duffel bag and moved
to Guyana eagerly.
Laura lived to tell her story because on the day of the massacre, she
wasn’t in Jonestown. She was one of a lucky few who’d been sent to
Georgetown, Guyana’s capital, on an assignment. Laura was tasked with
greeting Congressman Leo Ryan, a California rep who’d come to
investigate Jonestown, having caught word from members’ families that the
place was suspicious. Still an enthusiastic Peoples Temple loyalist, Laura
was sure to make a good impression. One hundred fifty miles east of
Jonestown, she missed the carnage entirely. You’d think narrowly escaping
such an event might turn one off to remote utopias, but two years later, in
1980, Laura joined another one: Synanon, the very same group my dad had
escaped eight years before.
Her involvement in two infamous cults notwithstanding, Laura seemed
totally level-headed when we spoke. Energetic and curious, she reminded
me of half the girls I went to liberal arts college with. She spoke of her
childhood as a popular girl, her well-adjusted family, her days hosting
Black Panther meetings in her kitchen, her love for communal living. “In
the seventies we had a saying: One person can only whisper. You need to be
in a group to stand strong,” Laura told me. So when she moved to San
Francisco in her early twenties and met a passionate organizer named Jim,
who told her he detested white supremacy and wanted to create a Socialist
haven outside of it, she thought, Where do I sign? Never did she predict her
political hero would murder all her friends under the guise of “revolutionary
suicide.”
This term is one of many Jones distorted in order to emotionally
wrangle his followers. “Revolutionary suicide” was, in fact, the very last
phrase he uttered before their deaths. Coined by Black Panther Party leader
Huey Newton in the late 1960s, “revolutionary suicide” initially described
the act of a demonstrator dying at the hands of their oppressor. The idea was
that if you took to the streets to protest the Man, the Man might shoot you
down, but the rebel behind you would pick up the banner and keep going.
They might get shot down, too, but the movement would continue, until one
day, one of your successors would carry that banner all the way to freedom.
“Revolutionary suicide,” as Newton meant it, was a phrase most Peoples
Temple followers could get on board with, so Jones slowly perverted it,
using it in various contexts depending on what he wanted out of them. On
some occasions, Jones described revolutionary suicide as an appropriate
alternative to being taken prisoner or being enslaved by the Man. Other
times he used it to describe the act of walking into a crowd of enemies
wearing a bomb and detonating it. But most famously, Jones invoked the
phrase on the day of the massacre, framing death for his followers as a
political statement against the Hidden Rulers (evil secret heads of
government), rather than a coerced fate they had no say in.
By March 18, 1978, many of Jones’s followers had already lost faith in
him. His mental and physical health had long been in decline; he’d been
abusing a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and suffered from a host of medical
ailments (which are hard to keep track of, since he exaggerated and lied
about a great many of them, including telling acolytes he had lung cancer
and then “curing” himself of it). Not to mention Jonestown’s brutal living
conditions. As it turned out, the “Promised Land” followers expected to
find in Guyana was not conducive to growing crops. Children were starving
and their parents were brutally overworked, sleep deprived, and desperate
to leave. That’s why Congressman Ryan came to town.
Having received tips from followers’ families that they were being held
captive against their will, Ryan decided to fly down and check in, and he
brought a few reporters and some delegates along with him. Jones,
impresario that he was, did everything to conceal the rotten truths of the
place while putting on a show for the Congressman (a lavish dinner,
confident banter). But Jones knew there was no way they’d let him off the
hook. At the end of the visit, Ryan and his crew returned to the small
Jonestown airstrip to leave, and several residents followed them, trying to
escape. Jones had ordered his militia to tail the defectors, and as soon as
they began to board, thinking they were in the clear, the squad turned on
them. They opened fire and killed five people: one Jonestown defector,
three journalists, and Congressman Ryan.
This event sparked the infamous “suicide.” Contrary to popular belief,
the tragedy wasn’t premeditated, at least not how the press painted it to be.
And most of its victims did not die voluntarily. Popular Jonestown coverage
spun a story that Jones regularly hosted ghoulish suicide rehearsals known
as White Nights, where his mind-controlled minions would line up like
lobotomized communicants and swallow cups of punch in preparation for
the “real” suicide on November 18, 1978. But this wasn’t what happened at
all.
Surviving Peoples Templers contend that the real White Nights were
much subtler events, and you didn’t have to be “mind controlled” to
participate. Originally, Jones used the phrase “White Night” to denote any
sort of crisis, and the possibility of death as a result of that crisis. He chose
this particular phrase to subvert the fact that our language tends to equate
the color black with negativity: blacklist, blackmail, black magic. He
decided the phrase “White Night” destabilized that concept. Not a bad
point, but a really bad motive. Over time, as Jones grew more deranged and
power-starved, the term evolved to mean a slew of insidious things. Some
say White Night described occasions when Jones convinced followers to
arm themselves with makeshift weapons and stay up for days on end,
prepared to defend their Promised Land to the death against attacks he
swore were coming but never did. Others remember the term referencing
the dozen or so meetings when people approached a microphone and
declared their willingness to die—that very night, if necessary—for the
Cause (the Peoples Temple term for living in service of the group, not the
self). There’s also the story that White Nights were weekly events when
Jones would keep the group up all night to discuss community concerns.
And then there are those who’ve said a White Night was simply any
meeting in which Jones mentioned death.
The congressman’s visit confirmed what Jones had suspected for a long
time: He couldn’t keep this thing up forever. Jonestown was a failure. Too
many people were trying to leave. He was doomed to be found out and
dethroned. So he gathered everyone in the main pavilion and told them the
enemy was on their way to ambush them. “They’ll shoot some of our
innocent babies. . . . They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors.
We cannot have this,” he announced. It was too late to escape: “We can’t go
back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies,
which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can
survive.” Then he made known his wish: “My opinion is that we be kind to
children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in
ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing
suicide. It’s a revolutionary act.” The words were smooth, as they had
always been, but surrounded by armed guards, residents were presented
with two options: die by poison* or be shot trying to escape.
This is what every leader of the half dozen “suicide cults” in history
have done: Taking an apocalyptic stance on the universe, with them at its
center, they believe their imminent demise means everyone else must go
down, too. For them, followers’ lives are chips on the table—and if they’re
going to lose either way, they might as well go all in. But hands-on killing
is a dirty job. They’re in the business of opportunism and manipulation, not
murder. So as soon as they feel their grasp on power start to slip, they bear
down on forecasts that the world is coming to a gruesome, unstoppable end.
The only solution, the leader preaches, is suicide, which, if conducted in a
specific way at a certain time, will at the very least render you a martyr and
at most literally transport you to the kingdom of God. Their loyalists back
them up, echoing their words, pressuring any doubters to follow along.
A few gutsy Peoples Templers tried to argue with Jones that day. One of
them was Christine Miller, a Black senior member who frequently stood up
to Jones. A poor Texas girl who grew up to become a successful LA County
clerk, Christine had opened her purse countless times for Jones, in whom
she placed ardent faith. But her willingness to compromise with him had
limits. By the time she reached Guyana, where members were supposed to
live simply and communally, sixty-year-old Christine refused to give up
wearing the jewelry and furs she’d worked so hard for. Known for her
unyielding frankness, she and Jones had a love-hate relationship that often
turned tense. At one meeting, Jones became so exasperated by Christine’s
opposition that he pulled a gun on her. “You can shoot me, but you are
going to have to respect me first,” she retorted—and he backed down. If
there were a time for Jones to heed Christine again, it’d be on March 18,
1978. Christine approached the mic at the front of the pavilion and tried to
defend her fellow members’ right to live, suggesting they look for
alternative outs, spare the children, flee to Russia maybe. “It’s not that I am
afraid to die, but . . . I look at the babies and I think they deserve to live,
you know?” she contested. “I still think as an individual I have a right to
say what I think, what I feel. . . . We all have a right to our own destiny as
individuals. . . . I feel like as long as there’s life, there’s hope.”
Jones let her speak; he even complimented her “agitation.” But
ultimately, the choice was made for her. “Christine,” he said. “Without me,
life has no meaning. I’m the best thing you’ll ever have.” Later that
afternoon, everyone under that canopy—including Christine, the guards,
and eventually Jones himself, who took a pistol to his head—was gone.
You can get just the tiniest sense of Jones’s coercive preaching style in a
piece of audio known as the Jonestown Death Tape. The forty-five-minute
recording captures the final speech Jones gave in the pavilion. “Death is not
a fearful thing, it’s living that’s cursed,” he proclaimed from his pulpit, as
parents, by his command, squirted fluid-filled syringes into their babies’
mouths, then had no choice but to administer their own doses or have
someone else finish the job for them. Upon swallowing the bitter punch,
followers were escorted outside one by one, where they perished, bodies
convulsing, collapsing, and coming to stillness on the lawn.
Forever a peacock, Jones made the Death Tape himself; now it’s public
record, and you can listen to it online. Survivors like Odell Rhodes, who
was one of only thirty-three to evade the poisoning that day (he hid under a
building until nightfall), maintain that Jones doctored the tape, stopping and
starting to whiteout bursts of protest, commotion, and cries of agony. The
Death Tape is a subject of intense fascination; at least half a dozen different
people, including religion scholars and FBI agents, have taken cracks at
transcribing it, eyes pinched shut, headphones turned all the way up, trying
to catch and confirm every last line.
If listening to nearly a thousand people squabble with Jones and each
other mere moments before the infamous tragedy weren’t hair-raising
enough, the Death Tape’s haunting soundtrack makes it stranger than
fiction. There’s a score of faint music playing underneath all the talking,
which sounds like it was added later for effect; as it turns out, the tape
originally contained a series of soul tunes. Jones taped over them, resulting
in a “ghost recording” of muffled, tempo-warped melodies. At the very end,
after the speech is over, you can hear “I’m Sorry,” a 1968 R&B song by the
Delfonics, played at half speed like a church organ.
Even in this brief excerpt of the Death Tape, you can get a chilling
impression of Jones’s rhythmic repetition and deceptive hyperbole.
If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace. . . . We have been betrayed. We have been so
terribly betrayed. . . . I’ve never lied to you. . . . The best testimony we can make is to leave this
goddamn world. . . . I’m speaking as a prophet today. I wouldn’t sit up in this seat and talk so
serious if I did not know what I was talking about. . . . I don’t want to see you go through this
hell no more, no more, no more, no more. . . . [Death] is not to be feared, not be feared. It’s a
friend, it’s a friend. . . . Let’s get gone, let’s get gone, let’s get gone. . . . Death is a million times
more preferable than 10 more days in this life. . . . Hurry, my children. . . . Sisters, good knowing
you. . . . No more pain now, no more pain. . . . Free at last.
The Death Tape is a poem, a curse, a mantra, a betrayal, a haunting.
And proof of language’s lethal power.
ii.
I was a spooky kid who grew up on cult tales, so I’ve been tuned in to
Jonestown stories ever since I can remember. My dad often compared Jim
Jones to Chuck Dietrich, the manic leader of Synanon. Though Dietrich
never led a “mass suicide,” my dad’s half sister Francie, who spent her
elementary school years in Synanon, told me that if Dietrich had stayed in
power a little longer, she could’ve seen it happening. Synanon wasn’t
physically violent while my dad was there, but like Jones, Dietrich grew
more bloodthirsty over the years. By the late 1970s, he’d appointed a
militarized coalition called the Imperial Marines, which carried out dozens
of violent crimes, like mass beatings against defectors, whom Dietrich
labeled “splittees.” One splittee was pummeled so hard, his skull was
fractured; he subsequently contracted bacterial meningitis and fell into a
coma. Just a few weeks before the Jonestown mass death in 1978, a lawyer
named Paul Morantz, who’d helped a few splittees sue Synanon, was bitten
by a rattlesnake Dietrich’s Imperial Marines had placed in his mailbox.
Dietrich was arrested after that, then went bankrupt, and by 1991, Synanon
had crumbled. Like most leaders of fringy communes, Dietrich never got as
far as Jones.
But nineteen years after Jonestown, someone got close. In late March
1997, another cult suicide made headlines, reminding everyone of the
tragedy in Guyana. This ordeal transpired in Rancho Santa Fe, California,
where thirty-eight members of Heaven’s Gate, a group of UFO-believing
doomsdayers, systematically took their lives over a three-day period. Their
deaths came by ingesting a mixture of applesauce, vodka, and barbiturates
before tying plastic bags around their heads. They completed the act within
the 9,200-square-foot mansion they shared, under the direction of their
grandfatherly leader, Marshall Applewhite, who perished alongside his
supporters in the same bizarre, theatrical manner. A sixty-five-year-old
seminary school dropout who went on to obtain a master’s degree in
musical theater, Applewhite boasted a snow-white buzz cut, saucerlike
eyes, and a passion for sci-fi tales. Like many power abusers in his
category, Applewhite claimed prophet status—more specifically, that he and
his by then deceased coleader, Bonnie Nettles (who passed away from liver
cancer in 1985), were elevated, extraterrestrial souls temporarily inhabiting
earthly bodies.
Jim Jones had lost the loyalty of many of his nine-hundred-plus
followers by the time of their deaths, but Applewhite retained his small
congregation’s steadfast support through the end. On the day of the
Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, all thirty-eight followers remained convinced
of the following scenario: A heaven-bound spacecraft trailing the Comet
Hale–Bopp was going to bypass Earth in March 1997, allowing followers a
chance to leave this “temporal and perishable world,” board the flying
saucer, and transport themselves to a distant space dimension Applewhite
swore was the Kingdom of God.
Using a soft but firm, paternalistic tone of voice, Applewhite spoke in
long strings of esoteric space talk and Latin-derived syntax to make his
small, pseudo-intellectual following feel elite. According to his credo, the
earth as we know it was on the verge of being recycled, or spaded under, so
that the planet might be refurbished. “The human ‘weeds’ have taken over
the garden and disturbed its usefulness beyond repair,” avows the Heaven’s
Gate website. As of 2020, the site remains upkept by two surviving
followers, though it doesn’t seem to have undergone much of a redesign (it
reads emphatically GeoCities; let’s just say there’s some cherry-red Comic
Sans happening).
But Applewhite had a way out—all his followers had to do to
“overcome their genetic vibrations” was “exit their vehicles” so their spirits
could reemerge aboard the spacecraft and carry them to a physical and
spiritual Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human. Earthly bodies were
merely “containers” that could be disregarded for a higher existence. The
souls who did not “graduate” along with them would inevitably reach “a
certain degree of corruption” and ultimately initiate “a self-destruct
mechanism at the Age’s end” (aka, the apocalypse). For the exclusive Away
Team, death was not only “nothing to fear,” but a “once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity” to enter a world that was “everlasting and noncorruptible.”
Like Jones, Nettles and Applewhite also went by many names: The
most famous were “the Two,” Bo and Peep, and Ti and Do (pronounced tee
and doe, like the notes on a scale). In Heaven’s Gate, every student chose a
new first name as well (and renounced their last name), which, per
Applewhite’s instructions, ended in the suffix –ody. There was
Thurstonody, Sylvieody, Elaineody, Qstody, Srrody, Glnody, Evnody, etc.
Scholars theorize the suffix was a quasi-portmanteau of Do and Ti, and it
served as linguistic proof that members had been rhetorically reborn of their
leaders.
“The language was symbolic of who we were becoming,” recollects
Frank Lyford, aka Andody, who belonged to Heaven’s Gate for eighteen
years. Frank initially joined the group as a shaggy-haired twenty-one-year-
old on a spiritual journey alongside his long-term girlfriend Erika Ernst,
who became Chkody. They both exemplified the typical Heaven’s Gate
joinee: white, ex-Christian, New Age–minded, middle-class, unmarried. For
the first half of Frank’s membership, Ti and Do proclaimed that the
transition from the “human level” to the “next level” would take place
while everyone in the group was alive and well. “So it would be a conscious
transition,” Frank, now sixty-five, explained to me in an interview. “That
didn’t really start to change until after Ti passed on.” The way Frank
remembers it, Ti’s death had a traumatic effect on Do; he started to become
more controlling, and his ideas about how to graduate to the next level
morphed. That’s when ending their human lives crept into the picture.
By the 1990s, Frank was starting to have doubts. At the time, Heaven’s
Gate members were allowed to have normal jobs outside the Rancho Santa
Fe mansion to earn money for the group, and Frank was employed as a
software developer. He loved the work—it was creative and stimulating,
and whenever he did something right, his boss gave him full credit. But
having an independent purpose beyond the Away Team went totally against
Heaven’s Gate dogma. After nearly two decades of suppressing his entire
identity in service of Ti and Do, Frank got the sense that being a cog in a
wheel, especially this wheel, was not the answer. He defected in 1993, and
though he begged Chkody to leave with him, she couldn’t be convinced.
Two years later, she “exited her vehicle” along with the rest of the Away
Team.
Now a much older man, with a thin melancholy face and rimless
rectangular glasses, Frank lives in Kansas, where he works as a personal
life coach for a mostly remote clientele. From the comfort of home, he
shares the fruits of his undeniably unique—and ongoing—spiritual
adventures. “I believe all of us came here with a specific path, a purpose to
learn things at the soul level,” he told me, his voice a soft, fluttery tenor.
Frank struggles with his speech—not quite a stutter, words tend to get
caught somewhere between his soft palate and the air in front of him. It’s an
impediment he attributes to Heaven’s Gate: Once, Applewhite mocked the
morning huskiness in Frank’s voice (he’d just woken up) with such
humiliating scorn that over time, he developed what he calls a “severe
inability to speak.” It’s a linguistic poltergeist that vexes him even after all
these years. Still, he continues: “Our experiences may look like trauma or
something horrendous. But no matter what we go through, there is
knowledge to be gained.”
Like Jim Jones, Ti and Do vehemently denounced mainstream
Christianity and the United States government, calling both “totally
corrupt.” They also shared Jones’s claim of being the only ones who could
solve the epic calamity that was modern life on Earth. But that’s about
where their similarities end. By the Heaven’s Gate era, the stick-it-to-the-
man ’70s were long gone; instead, Applewhite’s rhetoric was heavily
influenced by the 1990s’ UFO mania. It was a decade defined by shows like
The X-Files and Fox’s alien autopsy hoax. People were just starting to grasp
digital technology, but before widespread internet and smartphones, not
everybody had access to it, so it carried a certain mystery and, for followers
of Heaven’s Gate, new answers to life’s oldest questions. Applewhite was
obsessed with the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation,
particularly the show’s hive mind of alien antagonists called the Borg. The
Borg had a favorite saying: “Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
“Do loved that,” Frank Lyford recalled. “He espoused that hive mentality.”
To match his credo, Applewhite concocted a whole Heaven’s Gate
vocabulary of niche, sci-fi-esque terms. There was a severe regimentation
of daily life in the mansion, and the lingo helped keep things in order. The
kitchen was the “nutra-lab,” the laundry room was the “fiber-lab,” and
meals were called “laboratory experiments.” The group as a whole was “the
classroom,” followers were “students,” and teachers like Ti and Do were
known as “Older Members” and “clinicians.” If followers were off doing
something in normal society, that was “out of craft.” If they were in the
house they shared, that was “in craft.” “The special talk put them in a
rhetorical place where they could imagine themselves in the specific world
where they wanted to be,” analyzed Heaven’s Gate scholar Benjamin E.
Zeller, a religion professor at Lake Forest College. By marinating in this
specific, thematic vernacular every day for years, followers began to picture
life on that spacecraft, drifting toward the Kingdom of God. “It was doing
real religious work,” said Zeller. “It wasn’t just gobbledygook.”
On the day of their suicide, the Away Team was not only at peace with
their imminent graduation, they were giddy about it. You can see it yourself
in the “Exit Statements,” a series of goodbye interviews Applewhite’s
disciples filmed in the hours preceding the suicide and published on their
website. (I found the clips edited together on YouTube.) In these tapes,
Heaven’s Gate members all sport the same centimeter-long crew cuts,
billowy tunics, and placid expressions, backdropped by an idyllic outdoor
setting. Birds chirp perversely offscreen. For the camera, followers reflect
on their experiences in Heaven’s Gate and justify why they’re ready to enter
the next level, seeming not fearful or confused, but genuinely, gleefully
committed to their plan. “I just want to . . . say how grateful and thankful I
am to be in this class,” a camera-shy newer recruit tells the lens, “and to
thank my Older Member Do and his Older Member Ti for . . . offering us
the chance to overcome this world and . . . to enter the true Kingdom of
God, the evolutionary level above human, and become a next-level
member.”
Nearly a week after these videos were recorded, police found all thirty-
nine members’ bodies, including Applewhite’s, neatly posed—and
decomposing—in their bunk beds. Each was dressed in an identical
uniform: black sweat suit, fresh black-and-white Nike Decades, and an
armband patch reading “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” Members’ pockets
each contained a precise sum of cash: one $5 bill and three quarters (“toll
money,” apparently). Purple shrouds cloaked each body’s torso and face.
Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate were entirely unrelated groups whose
members shared almost nothing in terms of politics, religion, age, race, and
general life experience. The worlds each leader concocted for their
followers were very different, and so, too, was the rhetoric that narrated
them. But these groups’ grotesque codas placed them in the same unique
genre of cult, garnering worldwide fascination from scholars, reporters,
artists, and everyday onlookers, desperate to understand how someone
could become so “brainwashed” that they’d take their own life. Finally, an
answer . . .
iii.
Within and outside cultish environments, language can accomplish
real, life-or-death work. Volunteering at a youth suicide lifeline, I learned
firsthand that when used in a certain carefully considered manner, speech
can help someone not die. Conversely, language can also prompt someone
to die. The causal relationship between a charismatic figure’s speech and
another person’s suicide was judicially confirmed in 2017 during the
controversial Michelle Carter court case, where a young woman was
convicted of manslaughter for convincing her high school boyfriend to kill
himself via text message—an act described as “coerced suicide.” The
Michelle Carter case inspired the nation to have one of its first serious,
country-wide debates about the deadliness of words alone.
Year after year, we ask: What makes people join cults like Jonestown
and Heaven’s Gate? What makes them stay? What makes them behave in
wild, baffling, sometimes gruesome ways? Here’s where the answer starts:
Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion,
with language as their ultimate power tool, Jones and Applewhite were able
to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying
a finger on them.
Across the influence continuum, cultish language works to do three
things: First, it makes people feel special and understood. This is where the
love-bombing comes in: the showers of seemingly personalized attention
and analysis, the inspirational buzzwords, the calls for vulnerability, the
“YOU, just by existing, have been tagged to join the elite Away Team
destined for the Kingdom of God.” For some people, this language will
instantly sound like a scammy red flag, and others will decide it just doesn’t
resonate; but a few will have this transformative experience where all of a
sudden, something “clicks.” In a moment, they become filled with the sense
that this group is their answer, that they can’t not come back. This tends to
happen all at once, and it’s what makes a person “join.” This is called
conversion.
Then, a different set of language tactics gets people to feel dependent on
the leader, such that life outside the group doesn’t feel possible anymore.
This is a more gradual operation, and it’s called conditioning—the process
of subconsciously learning a behavior in response to a stimulus. It’s what
makes people stick by the group far longer than anyone on the outside can
understand. And last, language convinces people to act in ways that are
completely in conflict with their former reality, ethics, and sense of self. An
ends-justify-the-means ethos is embedded, and in the worst cases, it results
in devastation. This is called coercion.
The first key element of cultish language? Creating an us-versus-them
dichotomy. Totalitarian leaders can’t hope to gain or maintain power
without using language to till a psychological schism between their
followers and everyone else. “Father Divine said to always establish a
‘we/they’: an ‘us,’ and an enemy on the outside,” explained Laura Johnston
Kohl, our Jonestown vet. The goal is to make your people feel like they
have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but
inferior. When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it
helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because
you can paint anything from physical assault to unpaid labor to verbal
attacks as “special treatment” reserved only for them.
This is part of why cults have their own jargon in the first place: elusive
acronyms, insider-y mantras, even simple labels like “fiber-lab.” It all
inspires a sense of intrigue, so potential recruits will want to know more;
then, once they’re in, it creates camaraderie, such that they start to look
down on people who aren’t privy to this exclusive code. The language can
also highlight any potential troublemakers, who resist the new terms—a
hint that they might not be fully on board with the ideology and should be
watched.
But for most committed members, the special language feels fun and
sacred, like a snazzy new uniform. Followers shed their old vocabularies
with enthusiasm. “The goal was to substitute terms for everyday concepts
that might be a reminder of our previous identities,” Frank Lyford, the
former Heaven’s Gate member, told me. “In my way of thinking, that was a
good thing.” This goal of isolating followers from the outside while
intensely bonding them to each other is also part of why almost all cultish
groups (as well as most monastic religions) rename their members: Ti, Do,
Andody, Chkody. The ritual signifies a member’s shedding of their former
skin and submitting wholly to the group.
It’s not just followers who gain new names; outsiders get them, too.
Jones’s and Applewhite’s vocabularies were chockablock with
inflammatory nicknames used to exalt devotees and villainize everyone
else. A Heaven’s Gate member might be called a “student of the Kingdom
of Heaven,” a “recipient of the gift of recognition,” or a “child of a Member
of the Level Above Human.” By contrast, mainstream Christians belonged
to a “Luciferian program” and a “counterfeit God,” having succumbed to
the “lower forces.” Ti and Do encouraged their students to distance from
souls who hadn’t received the “deposit of knowledge.” According to
Heaven’s Gate teachings, mere possession of “the Truth” would make
separating from the rest of society “inevitable.”
In the Peoples Temple, “my children” was the coveted title Jones
bestowed upon obedient supporters, while “outside forces” naturally
applied to anyone who didn’t follow. Even more loaded, “traitors” meant
defectors, like Garry Lambrev, who’d seen the light but turned away. The
“Hidden Rulers” referred to what some might later call the “deep state.”
The odious “Sky God” (the bogus Christian deity) described the enemy to
“God in the Body,” aka Father Jones.
But the words themselves only did half the job; the other half was the
performance. As anyone who ever attended one of Jim Jones’s sermons
remembers vividly, the guy had a flair for the dramatic. On the pulpit, he’d
pound out short, hyperbole-laded phrases to get his congregation fired up.
Once the group energy was high, it did the work for him. Every time Jones
gave a sermon, he’d pick one fact from the news, or a historical event, and
catastrophize it. Jonestown survivor Yulanda Williams recalls Jones
showing the Redwood City congregation a film called Night and Fog about
the Nazi concentration camps. “He said, ‘This is what they have planned for
people of color. We’ve got to build our land up over there in Jonestown,
we’ve got to get over there. We’ve got to move fast, we’ve got to move
swiftly, we’ve got to pool our resources together,’” she explained. Garry
Lambrev couldn’t forget Jones’s rococo preaching style if he tried: “He’d
say things like, ‘The paper idle’ [his term for the Bible] ‘is useful for one
thing,’ and he’d point to his ass—toilet paper,” Garry narrated. “He would
tear it up theatrically on the podium and let the pages fly all over. Then he’d
say things like, ‘Nobody touch it, it’s damned,’ he’d cackle away, and we’d
all laugh.”
This phenomenon of listeners mistaking say-it-like-it-is honesty (which
of course isn’t actual honesty, just a lack of filter) for the refreshing voice of
antiestablishment dissent might feel familiar to anyone who’s lived through
the reign of a problematic populist: Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, Slovakia’s
Vladimír Mečiar, Donald Trump. It would be irresponsible, I think, not to
mention the oratorical similarities between Trump and Jim Jones, who
shared the same love of coining zingy, incendiary nicknames for their
opponents. (“Fake News” and “Crooked Hillary” were Trump’s analogs to
Jones’s “Hidden Rulers” and “Sky God.”) Even when their statements
didn’t contain any rational substance, the catchy phrases and zealous
delivery were enough to win over an audience. It’s riveting to watch
someone on a podium speak from a place so animalistic that most of us
don’t let ourselves behave that way even with our closest friends. As
Atlantic staff writer George Packer wrote in 2019, the strength of Trump’s
populist language lies in its openness: “It requires no expert knowledge. . . .
It’s the way people talk when the inhibitors are off.”
Over time, the memorable nicknames and insider-y terminology acquire
a strong emotional charge. When a word or phrase takes on such baggage
that its mere mention can spark fear, grief, dread, jubilation, reverence
(anything), a leader can exploit it to steer followers’ behavior. This lingo is
what some psychologists call loaded language.
Sometimes loaded language works by twisting the meaning of existing
words until the new significance eclipses the old one. Like how 3HO
redefined “old soul” from a compliment to something dreadful. Or how the
megachurchgoers from my childhood talked about being “convicted.” Or
how Jim Jones warped the meanings of “revolutionary suicide” and “the
Cause,” or how he defined “accidents” as “things that never happen unless
we deserve them.” If Jones were to say something like, “We need to do
everything we can to prevent accidents,” an everyday listener would
understand that sentence to have a fairly innocuous meaning, according to
the shared rules of semantics and reality that most speakers agree upon. The
loaded charge it carried for Jones’s followers would be lost, because for the
majority of us, “accidents” is a simple word with no identity or sky-high
stakes attached.
Other times, loaded language comes in the form of misleading
euphemisms. Certainly it’s no secret that when authority figures use too
many vague turns of phrase, it can be a sign of missing logic, or that
something inauspicious is hiding in a pocket of subtext. It’s also entirely
true that euphemisms can soften unpleasant truths without being
intentionally pernicious. Everyday speakers have plenty of them for taboo
concepts, like death (“passed away,” “lost their life,” “didn’t make it”),
which we might use to be polite, avoid discomfort, and maintain a certain
degree of denial.
But Jones’s and Applewhite’s euphemisms recast death as something
actively aspirational. Jones referred to the macabre reality as “the
transition” or, during his more manic moods, “the Great Translation.” On
the Death Tape, he calls dying a minor matter of “stepping over quietly to
the next plane.” Applewhite never used the words “dying” or “suicide,”
either—instead, he referred to these matters as “exiting your vehicle,”
“graduation,” “a completion of the changeover,” or “overcoming containers
to inherit next-level bodies.” These terms were conditioning tools—invoked
to make followers cozy up to the idea of death, to dismiss their ingrained
fears of it.
There’s a companion tool to loaded language that can be found in every
cultish leader’s repertoire: It’s called the thought-terminating cliché. Coined
in 1961 by the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, this term refers to catchphrases
aimed at halting an argument from moving forward by discouraging critical
thought. Ever since I learned of the concept, I now hear it everywhere—in
political debates, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my Instagram feed.
Cultish leaders often call on thought-terminating clichés, also known as
semantic stop signs, to hastily dismiss dissent or rationalize flawed
reasoning. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,
Lifton writes that with these stock sayings, “the most far-reaching and
complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective,
definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They
become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” So while loaded
language is a cue to intensify emotions, semantic stop signs are a cue to
discontinue thought. To put it most simply, when used in conjunction, a
follower’s body screams “Do whatever the leader says,” while their brain
whispers “Don’t think about what might happen next”—and that’s a deadly
coercive combination.
Thought-terminating clichés are by no means exclusive to “cults.”
Ironically, calling someone “brainwashed” can even serve as a semantic
stop sign. You can’t engage in a dialogue with someone who says, “That
person is brainwashed” or “You’re in a cult.” It’s just not effective. I know
this because every time I witness it happen on social media, the argument
comes to a standstill. Once these phrases are invoked, they choke the
conversation, leaving no hope of figuring out what’s behind the drastic rift
in belief.
Contentious debates aside, thought-terminating clichés also pervade our
everyday conversations: Expressions like “It is what it is,” “Boys will be
boys,” “Everything happens for a reason,” “It’s all God’s plan,” and
certainly “Don’t think about it too hard” are all common examples. Among
New Age types, I’ve also heard semantic stop signs come in the form of
wily maxims like “Truth is a construct,” “None of this matters on a cosmic
level,” “I hold space for multiple realities,” “Don’t let yourself be ruled by
fear,” and dismissing any anxieties or doubts as “limiting beliefs.” (We’ll
discuss more of this rhetoric in part 6.)
These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive
dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two
conflicting beliefs at the same time. For example, I have an acquaintance
who recently got laid off from her job, and she was lamenting to me about
how beside the point it felt when people responded to her bad news with
“Everything happens for a reason.” The layoff was due to a mix of crappy,
complicated factors like the tanking economy, poor company management,
implicit sexism, and her boss’s mercurial temperament—there was no one
“reason.” But her roommates and old coworkers didn’t want to think about
those things, because doing so would make them anxious, suddenly
hyperaware of the fact that life fundamentally bends toward entropy, which
would conflict with their goal of appearing sympathetic. So they fed her a
line—“Everything happens for a reason”—to simplify the situation and put
everyone’s cognitive dissonance to bed. “It’s work to think, especially about
things you don’t want to think about,” confessed Diane Benscoter, an ex-
member of the Unification Church (aka the Moonies, an infamous ’70s-era
religious movement). “It’s a relief not to have to.” Thought-terminating
clichés provide that temporary psychological sedative.
Jones had a whole repertoire of these phrases, which he’d whip out
whenever a follower’s question or concern needed silencing. “It’s all the
media’s fault—don’t believe them” was a go-to whenever someone brought
up a piece of news that challenged him. On the day of the tragedy, he
delivered phrases like “It’s out of our hands,” “[The] choice is not ours
now,” and “Everybody dies” to shut down dissenters like Christine Miller.
In Heaven’s Gate, Ti and Do frequently repeated rote sayings like
“Every religion is less than the Truth” to halt consideration of other belief
systems. To muzzle accusations that their theories were illogical, they
argued that if “the TRUTH about the Evolutionary Level Above Human”
was not yet clear to you, it wasn’t their fault. You simply hadn’t been
“bestowed the gift of recognition.”*
Having thought-terminating clichés like these meant that whenever
difficult queries arose—like, how can Jonestown be our only good option if
we’re all starving? Or, is there a way to achieve enlightenment without
killing ourselves?—you had a simple, catchily packaged answer telling you
not to worry about it. Digging for more information is poison to a power
abuser; thought-terminating clichés squash independent thinking. This
simultaneously puts the follower in their place and lets them off the hook. If
“It’s all the media’s fault” is burned into your brain, you quickly learn to
use the media as a scapegoat and not consider any other causes for your
suffering. If raising too many questions means you simply don’t have the
gift of recognition, then eventually you’re going to stop asking, because the
gift of recognition is what you want more than anything in the world.
In the most oppressive cultish environments, even if followers pick up
on these tactics and want to speak out against them, there are strategies in
place to make sure they are silenced. Both Applewhite and Jones kept their
followers from conversing not only with the outside world but also with
each other. It didn’t take long after settling in Jonestown for Peoples
Templers to notice that this Promised Land was a sham. But bonding over
their shared misery? Not allowed. Jones enforced a “quiet rule,” so
whenever his voice played over the camp PA system (which was often), no
one was allowed to talk. In Heaven’s Gate, too, followers’ speech was
heavily monitored. Frank Lyford remembers that everyone was expected to
speak at a low volume, or not at all, so that they wouldn’t disturb other
members. No communication, no solidarity. No chance to figure a way out.
iv.
Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a
placebo pill. And there are a host of reasons why it might be likelier to
“work” on certain people and not others. We’ll investigate some of these
factors throughout this book, but one of them has to do with a type of
conditioning most of us have experienced: the conditioning to automatically
trust the voices of middle-aged white men.
Over the centuries, we’ve been primed to believe that the sound of a Jim
Jones–type voice communicates an innate power and capability—that it
sounds like the voice of God. In fact, during the heyday of television
broadcasting, there was a known style of delivery labeled “the voice of
God,” which applied to the deep, booming, exaggerated baritones of
newscasters like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. It doesn’t take
much analysis to notice that the voices of history’s most destructive “cult
leaders” largely fit this description. That’s because when a white man
speaks confidently in public about big topics like God and government,
many listeners are likely to listen by default—to hear the deep pitch and
“standard” English dialect and trust it without much questioning. They fail
to nitpick either the delivery or the content, even if the message itself is
suspect.
In Lindy West’s essay collection The Witches Are Coming, there is a
chapter titled “Ted Bundy Wasn’t Charming—Are You High?,” which
criticizes America’s frightfully low standards for men’s charisma. As long
as someone is white, male, and telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll
follow even “the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed
by the universe,” West says. Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy.
Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy McFarland. Even racist
fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones.
Admittedly, it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements
equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s
chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific
danger. Jonestown, cult scholars agree, was a singularly extraordinary
tragedy, which had never happened before and remains unreplicated to this
day. And yet policy makers and media professionals across the political
spectrum have been guilty of tossing around “Jonestown” and “Kool-Aid”
as omens to warn against all kinds of people they disagree with, from PETA
members to abortion rights activists and right back at the anti-PETA and
antiabortion protesters screaming at them about Kool-Aid. I am not the first
person to point out the similarities between Jones and Trump, but I
highlight their overlapping oratories more as an invitation to consider the
precise language forms that contributed to Trump’s deceptive and violent
charisma, not to drum up fear that the man is capable of orchestrating a
mass poisoning in Guyana (I doubt Trump could even name which
continent Guyana is on). To think this reductively creates a false dilemma—
a scenario where something is either just like Jonestown or otherwise totally
fine. Which is obviously not the case; there are nuances. And isn’t cultish
rhetoric worth a look even when the stakes aren’t literally Jonestown?
In every corner of life, it’s true that the way we interpret someone’s
speech corresponds precisely to the amount of power we think they ought to
have. When it comes to “suicide cult” leaders, I can think of just one
woman who’s gained any significant amount of attention and authority. Her
name is Teal Swan, and at the time of this writing, she is very much still
alive. Swan is a thirtysomething self-help guru who operates mostly on
social media. To her loyalists, she is known as the “spiritual catalyst”; to her
critics, she’s the “suicide catalyst.” On the cultish continuum, Swan seems
to fall about halfway between Gwyneth Paltrow and Marshall Applewhite
—the midpoint between a self-serving “wellness” influencer and a bona
fide sociopath.
Most people who find Swan do so on YouTube. There, her “personal
transformation” videos offer tutorials on everything from how to overcome
addiction to how to open your third eye. She started posting videos in 2007,
and altogether they have received tens of millions of views. Swan utilizes
SEO strategies to target the lonely internet searches of people struggling
with depression and suicidal thoughts. A person might search “I’m all
alone” or “Why does this hurt so much,” and those keywords could lead
them to her content. Not everyone who “follows” Swan becomes a
follower-follower, but those who do might receive an invitation to the Teal
Tribe, her exclusive Facebook group dedicated to her most committed
adherents. Eventually, they might attend one of her in-person workshops or
fly down to her pricey retreat center in Costa Rica to undergo the
Completion Process, her signature trauma-healing technique.
Swan has no mental health accreditation; she uses an assortment of
dubious psychological treatments, like “recovered memory therapy” (the
controversial practice of unearthing “repressed memories,” which was
popular during the Satanic Panic and which Swan claims to have undergone
as a child to uncover lost flashbacks of “Satanic ritual abuse”). Most
modern psychologists say this exercise actually implants false memories
and can be deeply traumatic for patients.
But Swan’s unique vocabulary of “Tealisms” helps her establish herself
as a trustworthy spiritual and scientific authority. Like Jim Jones, who could
use the Bible to preach socialism, Swan invokes Eastern metaphysics to
diagnose mental health disorders. She blurs mystical talk of
“synchronicity,” “frequency,” and “the Akashic records” with the formal
language of the DSM: borderline, PTSD, clinical depression. For people
struggling with their mental health, who haven’t found a solution through
traditional therapy and pharmaceuticals, her brand of occultic psychobabble
creates the impression that she is tapped into a power higher than science.
(This marriage of medical jargon with supernatural-speak is nothing new,
either; it’s a strategy problematic gurus from Scientology’s L. Ron Hubbard
to NXIVM’s Keith Raniere have employed for decades. In the social media
age, a throng of shady online oracles have followed in Swan’s footsteps,
using this speech style to capitalize on Western culture’s resurrected interest
in the New Age. We’ll meet some of her controversial contemporaries in
part 6.)
Swan hasn’t caused any mass suicides, but at least two of her mentees
have taken their own lives. Critics attribute these tragedies to the fact that
Swan uses a range of highly triggering terms to talk about suicide: “I can
see your vibrations, and you’re passively suicidal” and “The hospitals and
suicide helpline do nothing” are a sampling of her signature thought-
terminating clichés. Although she claims not to support or encourage
suicide, Swan touts these sayings in combination with emotionally loaded
metaphors like “Death is a gift you give yourself” and “Suicide is pushing
the reset button.” As Swan posted on her blog, suicide happens because “we
all intuitively (if not mentally) know what is waiting for us after death is the
pure positive vibration of source energy.” Suicide, she pens, is a “relief.”
In the early 2010s, one of Swan’s longtime mentees named Leslie
Wangsgaard stopped taking her antidepressants, started having thoughts of
suicide, and approached Swan for guidance. After Swan, this guru she’d
trusted for years, told Leslie she didn’t seem to “want” her methods to work
and that she either had to “commit fully to life or commit fully to death,”
Leslie completed suicide in May 2012. Later, Swan stated that there was
“nothing that any healer could ever do for [Leslie’s] type of vibration.” Not
her, not anyone.
Perversely aligned with her reputation as the “suicide catalyst,” Teal
Swan, like Jim Jones, also became a sex symbol. There have been countless
articles written about her “goddesslike” beauty—her long dark hair, her
piercing green eyes, her skincare routine (“I can’t stop thinking about her
pores,” reads a line from one New York magazine essay). And most of all,
her voice, which sounds like a siren’s hypnotic lullaby in videos of her
saying it feels “delicious to die.” Normatively feminine and soothing,
almost motherly sounding, Swan’s voice carries a private, homey form of
power, especially since it’s something you consume alone in your house.
“I’ve talked to people who said they would just listen to her all night,” said
Jennings Brown, host of the investigative podcast The Gateway. Swan
makes no effort to approximate male authority, but for her particular brand
of nurturing “personal transformation” guru, it works. She’s not your
politician or prophet; she’s your DIY self-actualization mom. She’s seeking
exactly the breed of cultish leadership deemed acceptable for a beautiful,
thirtysomething white woman—no more, no less. And to that extent, people
follow.
v.
Techniques like us-versus-them labels, loaded language, and
thought-terminating clichés are absolutely crucial in getting people from
open, community-minded folks to victims of cultish violence; but
importantly, they do not “brainwash” them—at least not in the way we’re
taught to think about brainwashing.
Jim Jones certainly tried to use language to brainwash his followers.
Among the techniques he studied was Newspeak, the make-believe
language George Orwell created for his dystopian novel 1984. In the book,
Newspeak is a euphemistic, propaganda-filled language that authoritarian
leaders force their citizens to use as “mind control.” À la Newspeak, Jones
attempted to mind control his followers by, for example, requiring them to
give him daily thanks for good food and work, even though the labor was
backbreaking and the food scarce.
1984 was a work of fiction, but with Newspeak, Orwell satirized a very
real and widely held belief of the twentieth century: that “abstract words”
were the cause of World War I. The theory was that the misuse of abstract
words like “democracy” had a brainwashing effect on the world population,
single-handedly spawning the war. To prevent it from ever happening again,
a pair of language scholars named C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards wrote a
book called The Meaning of Meaning and launched a program to reduce
English to strictly concrete terms. No euphemisms, no hyperbole, no room
for misinterpretation or mind control. They called it Basic English.
But odds are you’ve never heard of Basic English, because it never
caught on or fulfilled its intended purpose. That’s because language doesn’t
work to manipulate people into believing things they don’t want to believe;
instead, it gives them license to believe ideas they’re already open to.
Language—both literal and figurative, well-intentioned and ill-intentioned,
politically correct and politically incorrect—reshapes a person’s reality only
if they are in an ideological place where that reshaping is welcome.
Not to disappoint any aspiring cult leaders, but there’s a linguistic
theory about the relationship between language and thought called the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which says that while language does influence our
ability to conceive of ideas, it does not determine it. That is to say, we are
still able to conceive of thoughts that don’t match the language available to
us. For example, just because one person might not know the color terms
“cyan” and “cerulean” (both vibrant blues) does not mean their visual
systems cannot physically perceive the difference between the two.
Someone very charismatic could try to convince them the two shades are
the same, referencing their lack of language as proof, but if the person
knows in their gut that these nameless blues look different, they couldn’t be
“brainwashed” to believe otherwise.
So when Jones invoked phrases like “revolutionary suicide” on the
Death Tape, they only succeeded in reminding those who still had faith in
him that what they were doing was right and good. They didn’t work on
Christine Miller anymore. By then, it was too late to get out alive. But it
was never too late to resist.
To this point, research consistently shows that “even if you’ve got a gun
to your head, people can resist if they want to.” That quote comes from our
British sociologist Eileen Barker, who’s been analyzing cult membership
for the past half century. Barker was one of the first scholars to publicly
question the scientific validity of “brainwashing.” Mind control first
emerged in the 1950s in press coverage of the torture techniques North
Korea reportedly used in the Korean War. By the 1970s, brainwashing was
a mainstream idea and served as a defense for the sketchy practice of
deprogramming—attempts to “save” new religion converts that often
involved illegal kidnapping and worse.* “The excuse was the person
wouldn’t be able to leave of their own free will,” says Barker. But instead,
what she found was this: Out of 1,016 study subjects who’d been involved
with the Moonies, 90 percent of those who’d been interested enough to
attend one of the workshops where this so-called brainwashing occurred
decided that the whole thing wasn’t really their cup of tea and quickly
ended their Moonie careers. They couldn’t be converted. Of the remaining
10 percent who joined, half left on their own steam within a couple of
years.
So what made the other 5 percent stay? Prevailing wisdom would tell
you that only the intellectually deficient or psychologically unstable would
stick by a “cult” that long. But scholars have disproven this, too. In Barker’s
studies, she compared the most committed Moonie converts with a control
group—the latter had gone through life experiences that might make them
very “suggestive” (“Like having an unhappy childhood or being rather low-
intelligence,” she said). But in the end, the control group either didn’t join
at all or left after a week or two. A common belief is that cult indoctrinators
look for individuals who have “psychological problems” because they are
easier to deceive. But former cult recruiters say their ideal candidates were
actually good-natured, service-minded, and sharp.
Steven Hassan, an ex-Moonie himself, used to recruit people to the
Unification Church, so he knows a little something about the type of
individual cults go for. “When I was a leader in the Moonies we selectively
recruited . . . those who were strong, caring, and motivated,” he wrote in his
1998 book Combatting Cult Mind Control. Because it took so much time
and money to enlist a new member, they avoided wasting resources on
someone who seemed liable to break down right away. (Similarly,
multilevel marketing higher-ups agree that their most profitable recruits
aren’t those in urgent need of cash but instead folks determined and upbeat
enough to play the long game. More on that in part 4.) Eileen Barker’s
studies of the Moonies confirmed that their most obedient members were
intelligent, chin-up folks. They were the children of activists, educators, and
public servants (as opposed to wary scientists, like my parents). They were
raised to see the good in people, even to their own detriment.
In this way, it’s not desperation or mental illness that consistently
suckers people into exploitative groups—instead, it’s an overabundance of
optimism. It’s not untrue that cultish environments can appeal to individuals
facing emotional turmoil. Love-bombing will feel especially good to those
weathering stressful life transitions. But the attraction is often more
complex than ego or desperation, having more to do with a person’s stake in
the promises they were originally told.
In Jonestown, for instance, the reason why Black women perished in
disproportionate numbers on that fateful day in 1978 was not that their
despair made them easier to “brainwash.” The targets of a complicated
political storm, Black women in the ’70s had an extremely hard time
amplifying their voices above those of the white (often unwelcoming)
second-wave feminist activists, as well as the civil rights movement’s
mostly male leaders. Jim Jones, who had ties to all the right people (Angela
Davis, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the reactionary
Nation of Islam, many left-leaning Black pastors in San Francisco, not to
mention his own “Rainbow Family”), seemed to offer a rare opportunity to
be heard. “Black women were especially vulnerable because of their history
of sexist/racist exploitation, as well as their long tradition of spearheading
social justice activism in the church,” explains Sikivu Hutchinson. The
reason so many of these women died was because they had so much to gain
from a movement that turned out to be a lie.
Laura Johnston Kohl readily admitted that no one forced her to buy
what Jim Jones was selling; she willingly heard the buzzwords and thought-
terminators she wanted to hear and tuned out the rest. “I was [in Jonestown]
for political reasons, so Jim thought, ‘Every time I see Laura sitting in a
meeting, I have to address politics.’ I let him address my priorities, and put
blinders on for other things,” she told me.
Letting people tell us only what we want to hear is something we all do.
It’s classic confirmation bias: an ingrained human reasoning flaw defined
by the propensity to look for, interpret, accept, and remember information
in a way that validates (and strengthens) our existing beliefs, while ignoring
or dismissing anything that controverts them. Experts agree that not even
the most logical minds—not even scientists—can escape confirmation bias
completely. Common human irrationalities like hypochondria, prejudice,
and paranoia are all forms of confirmation bias, where every little thing that
happens can be interpreted as an illness, a reason to deride a whole
demographic of people, or proof that something is out to get you. This
phenomenon also explains why, to a willing listener, even the vaguest
astrological horoscopes, psychic readings, and indistinctly “relatable” social
media posts seem to resonate uniquely.
Cultish leaders all rely on the power of confirmation bias by presenting
a one-sided version of information that supports their ideology and that
their followers actively want to hear; after that, confirmation bias does the
work for them. Enhanced by peer pressure, it becomes all the harder to
resist. Confirmation bias also explains why cultish leaders’ rhetoric is so
vague—the loaded language and euphemisms are made purposefully
amorphous to mask off-putting specifics about their ideology (and to leave
space for that ideology to change). Meanwhile, followers project whatever
they want onto the language. (For instance, whenever Jones used the phrase
“White Night,” followers like Laura interpreted it how they wished,
neglecting the possibility of more violent implications.) For most people,
the fallout of confirmation bias isn’t Jonestown-level urgent, but it’s not the
woefully naive or desperate among us who get that far. In many cases, it’s
the extraordinarily idealistic.
In her post-commune years, Laura became a public school teacher, a
Quaker, an atheist, and an immigrant rights activist. “I have not become less
political, but I have become less mesmerized by [the] words somebody
says,” she told a reporter in 2017. Still, Laura never stopped searching for a
way to achieve what the Peoples Temple originally promised. Even after all
the violence, hope remained. “If there were any way for me to live in a
community today, I would do it in a hot second,” she told me. “It just has to
be leaderless, and it has to be diverse.” Easier imagined than found; Laura
let loose a wistful sigh. “I just haven’t found a safe community that has the
things I want. But I am a communalist, always have been. I’ve had a wild
life, but I don’t want to sit with people who have had my same kind of
wildness. So I did really love living in Peoples Temple. Jonestown was the
highlight of my life.”
Frank Lyford, who lost his entire early adulthood and beloved partner to
Marshall Applewhite, doesn’t stew in regret, either. “My view of my
experience is, I incarnated with the goal of going through Heaven’s Gate.
The deeper we go into darkness, the higher we go back into the light like a
slingshot,” he professed. “If I hadn’t experienced the darkness and
suppression, the diminishing of self, I wouldn’t have had the impetus to
move into this self-awareness I have now.” Indeed, while love-bombing can
attract the broken, it’s those like Laura and Frank—those buoyed by enough
idealism to trust that the act of committing wholeheartedly to this group
will bring them miracles and meaning, to believe it’s worth the leap—who
stay.
“For me to have a positive outlook on life, I do my own brainwashing,”
Laura told me matter-of-factly. “You look at the news. I’m fighting cancer
now. We all have things in our lives that suck, things that try to keep us in
bed or not fighting back. I definitely believe in brainwashing, or I guess you
could call it ‘positive vibes’ in some settings. But I think we all brainwash
ourselves. Sometimes we have to.”
After our last interview, Laura and I remained in touch, emailed back
and forth, swapping Synanon stories. One night she got together with some
old Synanon pals for dinner, and with a guy named Frankie she wrote down
a list of all the special jargon she remembered from back in those days.
“Frankie thinks he remembers your dad—he was a youngster in Synanon at
that time too,” she wrote to me, the glossary enclosed. “Funny, the
synchronicity of life when you don’t expect it.” Two months later, Laura
passed away from cancer, surrounded by so many of the companions she’d
collected over the course of her wild life.
I can think of so many motives explaining why someone might enter a
community like the Peoples Temple or Heaven’s Gate. Maybe it’s because
life is hard and they want to make it better. Because someone promised they
could help. Maybe they want their time on Earth to feel more meaningful.
Maybe they’re sick of feeling so alone. Maybe they want new friends. Or a
new family. Or a change of scenery. Maybe someone they love is joining.
Maybe everybody is joining. Maybe it just seems like an adventure.
The majority leave before things get deadly, but the reasons some don’t
might also sound familiar. They’re the same reasons you might put off a
necessary breakup: denial, listlessness, social stresses, fear they might seek
revenge, lack of money, lack of outside support, doubt that you’ll be able to
find something better, and the sheer hope that your current situation will
improve—go back to how it was at the start—if only you hold on a few
more months, commit a fraction more.
The behavioral economic theory of loss aversion says that human
beings generally feel losses (of time, money, pride, etc.) much more acutely
than gains; so psychologically, we’re willing to do a lot of work to avoid
looking defeats in the eye. Irrationally, we tend to stay in negative
situations, from crappy relationships to lousy investments to cults, telling
ourselves that a win is just around the corner, so we don’t have to admit to
ourselves that things just didn’t work out and we should cut our losses. It’s
an emotional example of the sunk cost fallacy, or people’s tendency to think
that resources already spent justify spending even more. We’ve been in it
this long, we might as well keep going. As with confirmation bias, not even
the smartest, most judicious people are immune to loss aversion. It’s deeply
embedded. I’ve been in my fair share of toxic one-on-one relationships, and
noticing the similarities between abusive partners and cultish leaders has
been, to say the least, humbling.
So while power abuse can look like poisoned punch and purple shrouds,
the linchpin is what it sounds like. If a form of language cues you to have
an instant emotional response while also halting you from asking further
questions, or makes you feel “chosen” just for showing up, or allows you to
morally divorce yourself from some one-dimensionally inferior other, it’s
language worth challenging. The labels and euphemisms probably won’t
kill you, but if you’re after more than just basic survival, surely the most
fulfilling life is the one you narrate yourself.
“Our inner guidance is the best possible navigation any of us has,”
Frank Lyford told me. This doesn’t mean we can’t look outward (or
upward) for help through the chaos. “But to me,” he continued, “a good
coach is one who does not guide, but shines light on a person’s deepest
desires and blocks.” Not a guide, not a prophet, not a guru telling you just
what to say. But a candle in the dimly lit library of existence. The only
dictionary you need is already open.
i.
My favorite story to tell is the one about how I got kidnapped by the
Scientologists.
I was nineteen years old, spending a lonely summer in Los Angeles with
a crappy part-time job, a mild depression, and not much I could bring
myself to do except pal around with the one person I knew in town: an
aspiring young actress named Mani. We’d met freshman year at NYU.
Mani was living in the Valley while on break from school, sharing an
apartment with her mom and kid sister, auditioning for commercials and
starring in USC student films. Mani was spellbinding: She had long blond
hair and catlike Ukrainian features, wore baggy T-shirts with fishnets, and
owned a pet snake. Her full name was Amanda, like mine, but free-spirited
and untamable as she was, she went by the more exotic-sounding nickname:
Mah-nee. We’d carry out our days doing whatever she wanted. Mani would
say the word, and—mesmerized in that way insecure teenage girls always
are by self-possessed ones—we’d do it: I would drive from Santa Monica to
Studio City to pick her up in my Honda Civic, and we’d go thrift shopping,
or diner hopping, or horseback riding on Tuesday afternoons in the hills
($12 for two hours). Or, on one day, against my better judgment, accepting
an invitation to take a “personality test” at the colossal Church of
Scientology in Hollywood.
On this particular July afternoon, Mani and I were frolicking about
town, on our way to procure a Jamba Juice, when two twentysomethings
standing on Sunset Boulevard, dressed for a high school orchestra
performance (white button-downs, black slacks), held out a pair of
pamphlets and asked, “Do you want to take a personality test?” I was a self-
absorbed youth who loved nothing more than flipping to the quiz sections
of Seventeen and Cosmopolitan to find out who my Gilmore Girls
heartthrob was or what fall fashion trend I should try according to my
zodiac sign. But I had also spent two semesters in New York City, and so
had Mani, so you can imagine my surprise when, instead of bullishly power
walking right past this street team as if they belonged to a species below
human, Mani stopped, smiled, and said, “That sounds FUN.”
Once we examined the literature and discovered it was branded with
Scientology insignia, I thought for certain Mani would agree to steer clear
of these wackadoodles. Get the smoothies. Drive home. But no, Mani was
cool and beautiful and afraid of nothing, so the Scientology thing only
intrigued her more. “We have to do it,” she declared, batting her gigaparsec-
length eyelashes.
Trying to be as down for anything as Mani was, I consented. We put our
quest for frozen fructose on pause, climbed back into my Civic, drove four
blocks, and turned down L. Ron Hubbard Way. After parking in a spacious
lot, we sauntered up to the 377,000-square-foot cathedral, which I’d only
ever seen from afar. You might have come across photos of this place in a
documentary or a Wikipedia black hole—it’s that famous building with the
Grecian-looking facade embossed with a story-tall Scientology cross
(featuring eight points instead of four). It’s mecca for the twenty-five
thousand Scientologists living in the US,* most of whom reside
(troublingly) within twelve square miles of my current home in Los
Angeles.
Here in LA, Scientologists hide in plain sight: They’re your baristas,
your yoga teachers, your favorite CW-drama side characters, and—
especially—all those twinkly-eyed transplants hoping to strike it big in
Tinseltown. Wannabe film stars find ads in issues of Backstage magazine
promising career-making crash courses in entertainment, or they attend
artist workshops secretly backed by Scientology. Others accept street team
invitations to take a personality test. Some spend an afternoon touring the
impressive campus (it’s open to the public) or attend an intro course as a
joke. Some do it with a genuinely open mind, and most get the hell out of
Dodge long before they’re really in. But a select few look at celebrities like
Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Elisabeth Moss—Scientology’s mascots—
and tell themselves, That could be me.
You can’t clock a Scientologist in the wild by the way they dress or act
—only by how they speak, and only if you know what to listen for. “If you
were ever in Scientology, you could have a conversation with someone and
know what they were by the way they talked,” an ex-Scientologist named
Cathy Schenkelberg told me in an interview. Now in her forties, Cathy has
been out of Scientology for nearly two decades and lives part-time in
Ireland, working as a small-time actress. In 2016, Cathy gained some media
attention after coming forward with a story about how she once auditioned
for what she thought was a Scientology training video, but turned out to be
an interview for the role of Tom Cruise’s girlfriend. When they asked her
seemingly at random what she thought of the movie star, she told them
frankly, “I can’t stand him, I think he’s a narcissistic baby. I’m really
bummed about him splitting with Nicole.” Needless to say, she didn’t get
the gig, and not long after, Katie Holmes was cast instead.
These days, Cathy performs a one-woman traveling comedy show about
her Scientology experience called Squeeze My Cans. It’s a cheeky reference
to Hubbard’s famous E-Meter, a lie detector–esque machine resembling an
oversize portable CD player from the ’90s. An E-Meter is used to “audit”
(spiritually counsel) PCs (“pre-clears,” or auditing subjects), though even
the Church of Scientology admits that the device “itself does nothing.” A
few years ago, half a decade after she’d escaped the church, Cathy was
doing a voice-over gig for McDonald’s when she met a director named
Greg, and within five minutes of conversing, alarm bells sounded in her
brain. “He was giving me directions, and he used certain words,” she
said . . . like “enturbulated,” meaning upset, and “Dev-T,” which stands for
Developed Traffic and means “cause for delay.” “So I said to him, ‘Greg,
are you a Scientologist?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I was wondering the same
thing about you.’ He ended up killing himself, but that’s another story.
Yeah, he lost everything.”
Having big dreams makes you vulnerable; Scientologists know this, and
they claim to hold the keys to help you unlock your potential. “They call it
a postulate,” Cathy told me on a phone call from Galway, referencing
Scientology’s special label for a personal resolution, or what your average
LA stargazer might call a “manifestation.” Even deep into her Scientology
membership, after she’d lost entire homes and savings accounts and
relationships, after the church had taken up so much of her time that she
was barely auditioning anymore, Cathy never gave up on her ambitions of
making it. “I just wanted to do the levels and move back to New York and
be a musical theater actress,” she recounted dolefully. “But of course that
didn’t happen.”
Promises for an extraordinary life are how they roped in Cathy, who
stayed in the church for eighteen years, long after she was desperate to
leave it. In 1991, Cathy was a twenty-three-year-old entertainer on the rise
living in Chicago. She was starting to book big commercials and voice-over
jobs (“I don’t know if you’ve heard ‘SC Johnson: A Family Company,’ or
‘Applebee’s: Eatin’ Good in the Neighborhood,’” she performed for me
over the phone). That year, Cathy met a sweet fellow actress who told her
about an amazing artists group she was part of, full of up-and-comers just
like her. It was called Scientology. Cathy had never heard of the group, but
it sounded legit. It had “science” in the name, after all. Cathy started
accompanying the actress to local meet-ups, which she later learned were
organized by the church. “Like, ‘See? We’re not so crazy. We’re artists,’”
Cathy explained of their motives. “Art is the universal solvent! L. Ron
Hubbard said that.”
In the beginning, Cathy seemed like the perfect recruit—bright-eyed,
dedicated, making a good living, and eager to do good in the world. “Like
lots of people in their early twenties, I wanted to join the Peace Corps or
Habitat for Humanity, some type of group where I could contribute in a way
that wasn’t being a self-centered performer,” she explained. And she was
searching, spiritually. A cradle Catholic from Nebraska who grew up one of
ten kids, Cathy lost an older brother suddenly in a car crash when she was
thirteen. “That was a turning point for me,” said Cathy, who stopped going
to her home church after they tried convincing her God had “chosen” her
brother to die young, because he was “ready to be with God.” It was a
thought-terminating cliché, and Cathy wasn’t buying it: “I thought, ‘Well
then that’s not the kind of God I want anything to do with.’” She spent the
next decade seeking a higher power elsewhere—everything from crystal
meditation workshops to churches where they spoke in tongues. Nothing
stuck.
Originally, Scientology was pitched to Cathy as a nondenominational
group whose primary goal was to “spread hope for mankind.” She recalls,
“Everyone I talked to said the same thing, ‘Oh, you can practice whatever
you like,’ and I believed them. They play it cool.” But once inside, Cathy
quickly learned that partaking in other religions was absolutely not allowed.
“They call it ‘squirreling,’” she told me. “One day you look up and you
realize you’re in a room of five hundred people hip-hip-hooraying for a
bronze bust of L. Ron Hubbard at the front of the room.”
ii.
Back in Los Angeles, Mani skipped (as I trudged) into the elephantine
lobby of Scientology HQ, where we were greeted by a too-smiley white
gentleman in his forties. He was wearing a crisp, cornflower-blue suit and a
meticulous silver coif, and he spoke perfect Spanish to his largely Latinx
staff. “Thank you for joining us, follow me,” he said, ushering us deeper
into the building. Mani shot me a blithe smile, while I marked every nearby
exit.
In all, Mani and I spent more than three hours within Scientology’s
walls, zigzagging through a Byzantine sequence of their introductory
grooming tactics. First, we killed forty-five minutes in their museum hall,
meandering between exhibits of E-Meter devices and propaganda videos of
world religious leaders saying vague things about L. Ron Hubbard, edited
together to paint him as God’s gift to humanity. Then we were shepherded
into a classroom where the grinning man in the blue suit handed us each a
thick paper packet, a Scantron sheet, and a tiny golf pencil. We used these
to complete a ninety-minute personality assessment. When at long last we
finished, Mani and I wearily exited the room and waited another half
century while our results were tabulated. By midafternoon, Mr. Blue Suit
materialized and separated us to deliver our results. Mani went first; I
loafed about for another ungodly half hour, and then it was my turn to
reenter the classroom.
While Mani sat five yards away, having been passed on to a different
employee, engaged in a conversation I couldn’t hear, Mr. Blue Suit
proceeded to undress my personality. My test revealed the faults that were
holding me back in life—stubbornness, fear of vulnerability (fair enough,
though I quietly wondered what Mani’s had been). After every critique the
man repeated the same line, his eyes sparkling: “Scientology can help you
with that.” Once his spiel ended, he ushered me over to join Mani and the
other employee. Here came the hard sell. This second guy, a spray-tanned
D-list actor I thought I recognized, proceeded to pitch us a series of self-
improvement courses—books and workshops—nothing religious, just
“tools” to help us live better lives. For us, hardworking students with so
much promise, they’d cost just $35 a class. If we committed today, he could
take us to another wing of the building and show us a preview of what we’d
learn right now.
“They get you with the small basic courses,” Cathy explained to me,
eight years after my Scientology tryst. “That’s the bait and switch of it all.
They start you out with these courses on ‘communication’ or ‘ups and
downs in life,’ and you go, ‘Wow, this really helps.’” Unlike me, Cathy
didn’t grow up with a father who openly talked about the cult he was forced
into; she was open-minded and optimistic, and, most important, she didn’t
know anything about Scientology before she got involved. “It was 1991,
before Google, so it’s not like I could look it up,” she contextualized. “I was
just basing it on this actress I liked who was in it.” After Cathy started
paying for courses and further intertwining her life with Scientology, she
certainly didn’t do any independent digging, because the rules explicitly
forbid it. “I was told not to look on the internet, the newspaper, or any
‘black PR’ on Scientology,” Cathy said. “All of those people and journalists
were just trying to destroy Scientology because they know it’s the only
hope for mankind.” Now, every time Cathy entered a counseling session
(always prepaid, of course), the first questions asked were: Did you look at
the internet? Has anyone said anything bad to you about Scientology? Have
you had an affair? Have you been taking drugs? Have you talked to a
journalist? Are you connected to someone in an embassy or the
government, or politics, or a lawyer? “It was madness,” Cathy says in
retrospect—though at the time, these just seemed like routine precautions.
Very quickly, Cathy’s new circle started using us-versus-them verbiage
to isolate her from those on the outside. “They had ways of making you
look at people who weren’t in Scientology as less-than,” she remembers.
Any criticisms of the organization were labeled “hidden crimes.” A person
or behavior that threatened Scientology in some way—like associating with
an SP (suppressive person: a bad influence, like a journalist or skeptical
family member)—was instantly labeled PTS, potential trouble source.
There is a long list of PTS Types in Scientology. These classifications—
Types 1–3 and Types A–J—all refer to different enemies of the church:
doubters, criminals, people who’ve publicly denounced or sued
Scientology, people too closely connected with an SP, people who’ve
undergone a “psychotic break.” PTS Types covered the array of potential
“thems” and were used to legitimize the slander or persecution of anyone
who didn’t fall in line.
“My Scientology friend, Greg, the creative director on that McDonald’s
commercial? After he killed himself, they said he was PTS Type 3, which
meant he had a psychotic break,” Cathy told me. “But really, Greg had
spent all his money and his father’s money, sold his house, lost his job. He
was destitute.” It wasn’t “PTS”; Scientology had ruined the guy’s life.
Cathy sighed into the receiver. “Now that I think about it, I wasted two
decades of my life with that place.” But back then, she thought it was her
eternity. “With this knowledge, I was going to be able to come back the
next lifetime and handle stuff other people couldn’t, you know?”
Scientology operates on the logic that because L. Ron Hubbard’s “tech”
(belief system) is flawless, if you’re in the church and unhappy, then you
clearly did something to “pull it in.” This is a classic Scientology thought-
terminating cliché meaning that whatever negative experience you’re
having, it’s no one’s responsibility but yours. “You made it happen,” Cathy
explained. “If I tripped on the sidewalk and sprained my ankle, it wasn’t the
crack in the sidewalk that did it, it’s because I pulled it in.” Perhaps you
were entertaining doubts or associating too closely with an SP. In
Scientology, if you have an issue with your marriage, with a friend group,
or at work, you need to either disconnect, or “handle” (meaning convince
them to agree with the doctrine), or “get them on the bridge”—convert them
to Scientology.
While Mani nodded her head agreeably at the spray-tanned half
celebrity, a table of books and DVDs before us, I remembered a lecture my
mother had given me in high school after we’d decided to take up a family
friend’s invitation to spend spring break at a beach resort in Mexico. “As
soon as we arrive, they’re going to bring us into a little room, and they’re
going to try to sell us a timeshare,” my mother warned me, soberly.
“They’re going to feed us snacks, and compliment us, and make it sound
amazing. But the LAST THING you EVER want to do is buy a timeshare.
It will ruin your life. So we are going to say ‘no thank you’ over and over
again. And then they’re going to try to take us into another little room to
show us a video presentation. No matter what, we CANNOT let them take
us into that next room. We are going to stand up, and we are going to
leave.”
When I was nineteen, approaching my fourth hour behind those
Scientology HQ doors, I had no idea the millions of dollars and
psychological trauma this “church” had wrung out of everyday people
under false promises that started with $35 self-improvement workshops. All
I knew was that this felt like a timeshare sell. And I couldn’t let them take
us to that next room.
So I stood up. I said, “NO THANK YOU. WE ARE NOT YOUR
TARGET AUDIENCE. PLEASE LET US GO. MANI, WE’RE
LEAVING.” Spray Tan made eye contact with Mr. Blue Suit, exhaled, and
gestured toward the door. I grabbed Mani by the hand, and we ran—
properly sprinted—out of the classroom, through the museum hall, across
the lobby, and out the door, then swooped into my Civic and sped away,
never to turn down L. Ron Hubbard Way again.
“Kidnapped” might be a smidge over the top in describing my
interaction with the Scientologists . . . but I wouldn’t put it past them to
engage in such activities. Years later, I would learn that if I had let them
take it one step further by agreeing to purchase one of those courses, I
would’ve been led into a movie theater and shown a Scientology welcome
video, with the door locked behind me. If I had continued on with
Scientology from there, signed up for more courses and one-on-one
sessions, I would have sunk thousands of dollars, if not millions, whatever I
had, into my churchly commitment.
Because my ultimate goal as a Scientologist would be to “go clear”—to
ascend to L. Ron Hubbard’s highest level of enlightenment. The church
dangles this ambition above all its members, but its convoluted hierarchy of
levels—which secretly go on forever—ensures that going clear is not
actually possible. After Cathy had spent a few years in Scientology, she
made it to a level called Dianetic Clear, which, to her knowledge, was the
finish line. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great. I’m clear, I have no more
reactive mind, I’m going to go out into the world with this newfound
awareness,’” she recounted. But in Scientology, as soon as you arrive at
what you’ve been led to believe is the top, they reveal that there’s more.
This is just the beginning, actually, because now you’ve opened up a whole
other spiritual can of worms. Now you have no choice but to climb to the
next level, then the next. And whereas before it might have cost $5,000 or
$10,000 to level up, now it could be $100,000 or more.
As I continued to traverse Scientology’s Bridge to Total Freedom (the
path to going clear), I’d come to learn about supernatural concepts like
Xenu the galactic overlord and invisible “body thetans” (spirits of ancient
aliens that cling to humans and cause destruction). It would have been
lunacy. But I’d have to keep going. The sunk cost fallacy and loss aversion
would tell me I can’t quit. Not this far in. Plus, my superiors would insist, if
I leave right now in the middle of an upper level of auditing, I could pull in
misfortune. I could pull in disease, even death. One ex-Scientologist named
Margery Wakefield, a longtime officer in the OSA (Office of Special
Affairs, Scientology’s “intelligence agency”), wrote about how she was off-
loaded (kicked out) in the early ’80s for her perceived decline in mental
state. After more than a decade of membership and intense conditioning,
Margery was convinced that it was so energetically perilous to be off-
loaded in the middle of her current level that she would surely die within
twelve days. (She was flabbergasted when she, in fact, survived.)
If I’d gotten as far as Margery and joined the OSA or the SEA-Org
(Scientology’s paramilitary group), I would have signed a Billion-Year
Contract of spiritual allegiance and undergone training to help the church
execute federal crimes: breaking and entering, stealing government
documents, wiretapping, destroying criminal evidence, lying under oath,
whatever was deemed necessary to protect the church. Once, Margery
alleges, she witnessed church officials plan the murders of two people. One
was a defector, who’d been caught by the OSA and taken prisoner in a
motel room. “The next day they were going to take him out to sea and deep
six him—tie weights to him and dump him overboard,” she wrote in a 1990
affidavit. The other was a journalist who’d written a book that spoke
critically of Scientology (a fact I try my best to forget).
Because, as I would eventually learn, Scientology law > wog law
(“wog” meaning outsider; it may be connected to an outdated racial slur, but
etymologists aren’t sure). According to multiple ex-Scientologists, there’s a
whole course on how to lie to wogs. It’s called TR-L, which stands for
Training Routine Lie. Purportedly, in TR-L, Scientologists learn the skill of
lying with unwavering confidence, even under extreme stress. In her
affidavit, Margery Wakefield details an incident from her time in the OSA
when she was forced to make false allegations of sexual misconduct against
a judge. The judge was slated to preside over a case dealing with
Scientology, but allegedly, the church didn’t like him and wanted him
removed, so they assigned Margery to claim he’d sexually harassed her.
Before testifying, Margery remembers asking one of her superiors about
lying under oath and was answered with a quote from a Hubbard policy
called “the greatest good for the greatest number of dynamics.”* It meant
that whatever it took to ensure Scientology’s survival must be done. It
meant to call on her TR-L and obey. It meant the ends justified the means.
By that point, I would have become so absorbed in Scientology’s
doctrine that I would not even be able to communicate with anyone outside
the church. “I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to a conversation between
two high-ranking Scientologists,” Steven Hassan, our ex-Moonie
psychologist, told me, “but you won’t understand anything they’re talking
about.” Because with Scientology, as with all cultish religions, language is
the beginning and end of everything. In a sense, it’s God itself.
iii.
This is the power of religious language: Whether it’s biblical words
we’ve grown up with and know so well we never consider anything
different (God, commandment, sin), or alternative phrases from a newer
movement (audit, PC, Bridge to Total Freedom), religious speech packs a
unique punch. Remember the theory of linguistic performativity, the one
about how language doesn’t just reflect reality, it actively creates reality?
Religious language, some scholars say, is the single most intensely
performative kind of speech there is. “Much religious language ‘performs’
rather than ‘informs,’ [rousing us] to act out the best or the worst of our
human nature,” wrote Gary Eberle in his book Dangerous Words.
Religious utterances cause events to transpire in a way that feels
incomparably profound for believers. “We used chants to manifest things, to
make things happen, to make ourselves believe in things,” said Abbie Shaw,
a twenty-seven-year-old social worker and ex-member of Shambhala, a
controversial offshoot of Tibetan Buddhism, whom I met at a party in LA
and interviewed a few days later. “Some of the language I loved and call on
to this day, and some of it caused the most bizarre trauma I’ve ever
experienced.”
Think of all the performative verbs that come up in religious scenarios:
bless, curse, believe, confess, forgive, vow, pray. These words trigger
significant, consequential changes in a way that nonreligious language just
doesn’t. The phrase “In the name of God” can allow a speaker to wed,
divorce, even banish someone in a way that “In the name of Kylie Jenner”
cannot (unless you truly do worship at the altar of Kylie Jenner, believing
she has sole jurisdiction over your life and afterlife, in which case, I stand
corrected, and I wish I’d interviewed you for this book). You could very
well say “In the name of God” (and certainly “In the name of Kylie
Jenner”) in a nonreligious way. Scriptural phrases pervade our daily secular
lives—just think of Bible-themed slang like #blessed. But these expressions
assume a special, supernatural force when stated in a religious context,
because the speaker is invoking what they believe to be the ultimate
authority to imbue their declaration with meaning.
“Religious language involves us in the largest context of all,” Eberle
writes. It’s beyond the domain of the workplace or politics; if someone
really believes, it’s beyond all of space and time. Eberle continues: “While
a baseball umpire calling ‘Y’er out’ is performative within the ballpark in
the context of the game, religious language involves the performance of a
person’s whole self and very existence.”
There’s a reason most religions encourage prayer: Language strengthens
beliefs. In her studies of contemporary witches and “charismatic Christians”
(if they do say so themselves*), psychological anthropologist Tanya
Luhrmann found that if one wants to know their higher power—if they
want that deity to seem real—they have to open their mouths and speak to
them. The theological vocabulary between the Christians and witches
Luhrmann observed was quite different, but for both, repeatedly engaging
in prayers or spells “sharpened their mental imagery” of the figure on the
receiving end. Practice talking to a spiritual authority over and over again,
and in time, you’ll conjure the experience that Yahweh or the alien
overlords or whoever you’re chatting with is talking back. Eventually, when
certain spontaneous thoughts pop into your mind during the conversation
(or what Luhrmann calls an “imaginal dialogue”)—say, a certain person’s
face or a scene that seems to answer a question you’ve been pondering—
these thoughts will seem not self-authored but instead as though they are
coming straight from your higher power. People need something to help
make the supernatural feel real, Luhrmann told me, and language does
precisely that.
In order to keep the tremendous power of religious language healthy
and ethical, it must be confined to a limited “ritual time.” This refers to a
metaphorical domain in which using Biblical words like “covenant” or
Tibetan chants suddenly seems completely appropriate. To enter ritual time,
some symbolic action typically must take place, like singing a song,
lighting a candle, or clipping on your SoulCycle shoes (really). Rituals like
these signal that we’re separating this religious thing we’re doing from the
rest of our daily life. And there’s often an action at the end, too (blow out
the candle, repeat “namaste,” unclip the shoes) to get us out of ritual time
and back to everyday reality. There’s a reason the word “sacred” literally
means “set aside.”
But an oppressive group doesn’t let you leave ritual time. There is no
separation, no going back to a reality where you have to get along with
people who might not share your beliefs, where you understand that
performing a mantra or citing the Ten Commandments in the middle of
lunch would be a violation of the unspoken rules for how to be. With
destructive groups like Scientology, the Moonies, the Branch Davidians,
3HO, The Way International (a fundamentalist Christian cult we’ll talk
about later), and so many others, there is no longer a “sacred space” for that
special language. Now words like “abomination,” “curse,” and “lower
vibration” or whatever unique vocabulary the group uses holds that
almighty power all the time.
In American culture, religious language (particularly Protestant
language) is everywhere, informing secular choices we make without us
even explicitly noticing. I recently came across a frozen low-fat mac ’n’
cheese meal with the word “sinless” printed on the packaging. Conjuring
the devil to talk about microwavable noodles felt a touch melodramatic, but
that’s how deep religious talk runs in American culture: There are sinners
and saints, and the latter choose 2 percent dairy.
The permeable membrane between religion and culture is also what
allows so many corners of the capitalist marketplace to call upon God to
promote their products . . . including and especially the multilevel
marketing industry (a cult category we’ll discuss in depth in part 4).
Christian-affiliated direct sales companies like Mary Kay Cosmetics and
Thirty-One Gifts encourage recruits by saying that God is actively
“providing” them with the “opportunity” to sell makeup and tchotchkes . . .
and to convert others to do so, as well. Billion-dollar businesswoman Mary
Kay Ash was once confronted in an interview about her famous tagline:
“God first, family second, Mary Kay third.” When asked if she thought she
was using Jesus as a marketing ploy, she responded, “No, he’s using me
instead.”
iv.
You could fill a book longer than this one with a list of all the thought-
terminating clichés, loaded language, and us-versus-them labels cultish
religions around the world use to convert, condition, and coerce their
followers.
To start, take a look at Shambhala, where thought-terminating clichés
were disguised as wise Buddhist truisms. In 2016, ex-Shambhalan Abbie
Shaw moved to the group’s idyllic Vermont commune to work the front
desk and study meditation for what was only supposed to be a casual
summer. A recent college graduate from California who’d relocated to New
York City for a job in PR, Abbie missed the co-ops she’d lived in as a
student at UC Santa Cruz. By her mid-twenties, Abbie was looking to press
a spiritual reset button. That’s when she dropped into a Tibetan mindfulness
class and quickly fell in love with its teachings of “basic goodness”—the
idea that all beings are born whole and worthy, but become lost along the
way. That’s why we meditate: to get our basic goodness back.
Abbie was hungry to learn more, but extended meditation retreats were
expensive. So when an instructor told her about the opportunity to spend
three months with Shambhala for free, working and living in a small
pastoral town, it seemed like just the “journey” she was looking for.
Shambhala had dozens of meditation centers and retreats all over the world;
Vermont was one of their largest. Abbie couldn’t wait to get out of the city.
She booked her ticket.
Right away, there was a lot to love about Shambhala—the camaraderie,
the teachings of generosity and acceptance, even the trees seemed too good
to be true. “I remember when I first landed in Vermont, I had never seen so
many shades of green,” Abbie told me over coffee, two years after
defecting.
Shambhala was founded in the 1970s by Tibetan monk and meditation
guru Chögyam Trungpa. Largely responsible for bringing Tibetan
Buddhism to the West, Trungpa had studied comparative religion at Oxford
and earned a reputation, even among many non-Shambhalans, as an
enlightened genius. He counted among his pupils the poet Allen Ginsberg,
author John Steinbeck, David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell. “I’m confused now
how to feel about him because his books are amazing,” Abbie confessed.
“He was a master of language. A poet.”
But Trungpa also had a raging alcohol problem, which everyone knew
and quietly accepted. Complications from alcohol abuse are what ultimately
led to his death in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, after which his son, known
as the Sakyong, took his place. Trungpa didn’t try to hide his addiction; in
fact, he found ways to work it into his teachings. Notoriously, Shambhala
celebrations overflowed with booze and debauchery. “In the Buddhism
world, the Shambhalas are known as the party Buddhists,” Abbie recounted
with ambivalence. Trungpa also famously slept with many of his students,
some of whom became Abbie’s teachers. “There was no way that stuff was
all consensual,” she winced. “But everyone was just like, ‘Oh, it was the
seventies.’”
Trungpa was the nucleus of the Shambhala “mandala.” This was the
organization’s chain of command: a sea of plebeian practitioners and a
pecking order of teachers above them. Trungpa was obsessed with
militaries and hierarchies, especially after his stint in England, so he infused
his rhetoric with war metaphors; followers learned to call themselves
“warriors of Shambhala.” A pyramid of power is very anti-Buddhist,
however, so Trungpa disguised it as a circle, a mandala, with no “top” but a
cozy center instead.
If members had a question or concern, there was no skipping rank.
Abbie remembers an acharya (a high-ranking teacher) toward the mandala’s
center, a wealthy white man whose wife was, in Abbie’s words, “a total
asshole.” Milking the limited authority available to her, the wife would
revel in making worker bees like Abbie perform menial tasks, like
handwashing napkins or repeating tedious rituals in front of her. But
whenever Abbie tried to bring up the wife’s actions to a shastri (a low-
ranking teacher), she was delivered the same thought-terminating cliché:
“Why don’t you sit with that?”
This was a bastardization of a key Buddhist teaching, which says to
“drive all blames into one.” Essentially, it means that if you’re experiencing
something negative, you can’t change the outside world, so you have to
look inward to solve the conflict. (So many shady New Age gurus—ranging
from NXIVM’s Keith Raniere to Teal Swan–type self-help guides—warp
similar teachings to fault followers for their own mistreatment under the
guise of “internal work” and “overcoming fears.”) “What people struggle
with,” Abbie continued, “and it’s a huge philosophy question in Buddhism,
is how do you challenge social injustice?” How do you address external
problems that are so clearly not rooted in your own baggage, while still
following Buddhism’s principles? “There are a lot of really interesting
answers,” said Abbie, “but in Shambhala, we didn’t get any.” In Vermont,
the presented “solution” was always the same: Why don’t you sit with that?
Shambhala’s use of cultish language was manipulative in an eerily
passive way . . . totally unlike Scientology, whose founder wasn’t one for
subtlety. L. Ron Hubbard got his start less as a spiritual leader and more as
a sci-fi buff who took his fandom way too far. Hubbard was obsessed with
space fantasy and George Orwell, and he authored hundreds of science
fiction stories, which served as precursors to Scientology’s texts. In the
style of conlangs (constructed languages) like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-
earth tongues, Hubbard published not one but two unique Scientology
dictionaries: the Technical Dictionary and the Admin Dictionary. Together,
these volumes contain over three thousand entries. As of this writing, you
can look up portions of the Technical Dictionary online and go absolutely
cross-eyed combing through entries from A through X. Hubbard filled these
books with existing English words (“dynamic,” “audit,” “clear,” etc.)
charged with new Scientology-specific meanings, as well as made-up
neologisms—Dianetics and thetans are among the most recognizable.
Hubbard liked the technical sound of jargon from fields like psychology
and software engineering, so he co-opted and redefined dozens of technical
terms to create the impression that Scientology’s belief system was rooted
in real science. The word “valence,” for example, has several definitions
across linguistics, chemistry, and math, and generally refers to the value of
something. But in Scientology, “valence” signifies possession by an evil
spirit or personality, as in the sentence, “You sure mock up a good SP
valence.” To a neuropsychologist, an “engram” is a hypothetical change in
the brain related to memory storage, but to a Scientologist, it’s a mental
image recorded after a painful unconscious episode from a PC’s past.
Engrams are stored in the reactive mind and require auditing if the PC has
any hopes of going clear (and if you can understand that sentence, mazel
tov, you’re on your way to speaking fluent Scientology).
The linguistic world Hubbard created was so legit-sounding—so
inspired and comprehensive—that it sparked a host of copycat “cult
leaders.” NXIVM founder Keith Raniere lifted all kinds of terms straight
from Scientology, like “suppressives,” “tech,” and “courses,” as well as
illusory, pseudo-academic acronyms, like EM (exploration of meaning,
NXIVM’s version of auditing) and DOS (Dominus Obsequious Sororium,
Latin for “Dominant Submissive Sorority,” a secret all-female club within
NXIVM composed of so-called “masters” and sex-trafficked “slaves”).
Like in Scientology, Raniere knew his followers were motivated by a desire
for exclusive, erudite wisdom; his knockoff Hubbardese helped him exploit
that.*
In the style of Newspeak, Hubbard took dozens of common words that
boast a range of colorful English meanings and reduced them to one
incontestable Scientology definition. “Clear” means at least thirty different
things in everyday English (easy to understand, empty or unobstructed,
acquitted of guilt, free of pimples, etc.). But in Scientology, it has but one
solitary definition: “a person who has completed the Clearing Course.”
Using it any other way would be to demonstrate a lack of understanding of
Hubbard’s texts. That would be considered PTS, a threat to the church,
which you’d want to avoid at all costs.
Scientology knows it has no power without its cultish language, but that
the language is also what implicates the group as dangerously cultish. So, to
stay as clandestine and protected as possible, the church holds a slew of
copyrights on its writings, terminology, names, even symbols. Infamously
litigious, Scientology frequently buries outsiders and defectors who
comment on or satirize its language too publicly (oops) under groundless
lawsuits and metaphysical threats that exposing untrained ears to mere talk
of Xenu and other high-level Scientology concepts will bring on
“devastating, cataclysmic spiritual harm.”
On the phone with Cathy, I told her I hadn’t remembered Mr. Blue Suit
talking about evil galactic monarchs or thetans during my experience at
Scientology HQ that summer in LA. “Well, of course not,” she replied.
“They don’t start you out with that stuff. They’d lose you. If they told me
about aliens when I first got there, I would have been out, and it would have
saved me a lot of money.” For this reason, Scientology’s intro courses—
Overcoming Ups and Downs in Life, Communication—are all quite broad,
and delivered in plain English. To ease you into the ideology, the vernacular
is introduced bit by bit.
“They start just by shortening a lot of words,” Cathy told me. Indeed,
Scientology’s lexicon is replete with insider-y acronyms and abbreviations.
If a word can be shortened, they do it: ack (acknowledgment), cog
(cognition), inval (invalidation), eval (evaluation), sup (supervisor), R-
factor (reality factor), tech (technology), sec (security), E-Meter
(electropsychometer), OSA and RFP (parts of the organization), TR-L and
TR-1 (training routines), PC, SP, PTS, and so on ad nauseam.
Spend ten or twenty years committed to the church, and your
vocabulary will be replaced wholesale by Hubbardese. Take a look at this
dialogue, an example of an entirely plausible conversation between
Scientologists that Margery Wakefield composed for her 1991 book
Understanding Scientology. Translations (by yours truly) are in brackets.
Two Scientologists meet on the street.
“How’re you doing?” one asks the other.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve been a bit out ruds [rudiments; tired, hungry, or upset]
because of a PTP [present time problem] with my second dynamic [romantic partner] because
of some bypassed charge [old negative energy that’s resurfaced] having to do with my MEST
[Matter, Energy, Space, and Time, something in the physical universe] at her apartment. When I
moved in I gave her an R-Factor [reality factor, a harsh talking-to] and I thought we were in
ARC [affinity, reality, and communication; a good state] about it, but lately she seems to have
gone a bit PTS so I recommended she see the MAA [an officer in the SEA-Org] at the AO
[Advanced Organization] to blow some charge [get rid of engram energy] and get her ethics in
[getting your Scientology shit together]. He gave her a review [auditing assessment] to F/N
[floating needle, sign of a completed audit] and VGIs [very good indicators] but she did a roller
coaster [a case that improves and worsens], so I think there’s an SP somewhere on her lines
[auditing and training measures]. I tried to audit her myself but she had a dirty needle [an
irregular E-Meter reading] . . . and was acting really 1.1 [covertly hostile] so I finally sent her
to Qual [Qualifications Division] to spot the entheta on her lines [something that happens if
you’ve recently consumed black PR]. Other than that, everything’s fine . . .
In the beginning, learning this private terminology makes speakers feel,
well, cool. “In the early days, it was really fun . . . or ‘theta,’ as we’d say,”
Cathy told me, referencing Scientology’s slang term for “awesome.” Who
doesn’t love a secret language? “It made you feel superior, because you had
these words that other people didn’t, and you did the work to understand
them.”
It’s not just religious cult leaders who use language to imbue followers
with a false sense of elitism; I’ve noticed similar us-versus-them rhetoric in
cultier areas of my own life. For a few years, I was employed as a writer at
a cliquey online fashion magazine, and one of the first things I noticed
about my chic new colleagues was how they spoke almost entirely in
inscrutable abbreviations (or “abbrevs”). They even made up abbreviations
that took exactly as long to say as the full-length words (for instance, they
always referred to this one website called “The Ritual” as “T. Ritual”),
simply because it sounded more exclusive—harder for “uncool people” to
understand. To me, it was clear that this language served as a detection
system to identify insiders and outsiders. And it was a way of gaining
control, of coaxing underlings to learn the lingo, to conform, which they did
eagerly, in hopes of being “chosen” for special opportunities and
promotions.
In Scientology, it was hard to see how a few fun acronyms could cause
much harm. But under the surface, these word shortenings were deliberately
working to obscure understanding. In any given professional field,
specialized jargon is often necessary in order to exchange information more
succinctly and specifically; it makes communication clearer. But in a cultish
atmosphere, jargon does just the opposite: Instead, it causes speakers to feel
confused and intellectually deficient. That way, they’ll comply.
This confusion is part of the big trick. Feeling so disoriented that you
doubt the very language you’ve been speaking your whole life can make
you commit even more strongly to a charismatic leader who promises to
show you the way. “We want to make sense of reality, and we use words to
explain to ourselves what’s happening,” Steven Hassan explained. When
your means of narration are threatened, it’s distressing. By nature, people
are averse to such high levels of internal conflict. In states of
bamboozlement, we defer to authority figures to tell us what’s true and what
we need to do to feel safe.
When language works to make you question your own perceptions,
whether at work or at church, that’s a form of gaslighting. I first came
across the term “gaslighting” in the context of abusive romantic partners,
but it shows up in larger-scale relationships, too, like those between bosses
and their employees, politicians and their supporters, spiritual leaders and
their devotees. Across the board, gaslighting is a way of psychologically
manipulating someone (or many people) such that they doubt their own
reality, as a way to gain and maintain control. Psychologists agree that
while gaslighters appear self-assured, they are typically motivated by
extreme insecurity—an inability to self-regulate their own thoughts and
emotions. Sometimes gaslighters aren’t even 100% aware that what they’re
doing is manipulative. In cultish scenarios, however, it’s often a deliberate
method of undermining the fundamentals of truth so followers will come to
depend wholly on the leader for what to believe.
The term “gaslight” originates from a 1938 British play of the same
name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she’s gone mad. He
does this in part by dimming the gaslights in their house and insisting that
she’s delusional every time she points out the change. Since the 1960s,
“gaslighting” has been used in everyday conversation to describe one
person’s attempts at tricking another into mistrusting their entirely valid
experiences.* “Gaslighting sometimes happens when words are used so
people can’t quite understand,” explains sociologist Eileen Barker. “They
become confused, made to feel fools. Words can sometimes mean the exact
opposite of what you think they mean. Satanic groups do this, where evil
means good and good means evil.” Loaded language and thought-
terminating clichés (like Shambhala’s “why don’t you sit with that”) can
prompt followers to disregard their own instincts. “Words,” says Barker,
“can make it so you don’t quite know where you are.”
In Scientology, by far the most exotic form of gaslighting shows up in a
process called Word Clearing. I could not believe my eyes the first time I
read about this dizzying exercise, through which a follower strips their
vocabulary of what the church calls misunderstood words, or MUs.
“According to church doctrine, the reason all of you reading this essay
aren’t sitting in a Scientology course room right this minute is because you
have MUs,” wrote ex-Scientologist Mike Rinder for his blog. “LRH’s tech
is flawless and not to be questioned—everything he wrote is easy to
understand and makes perfect sense. If something can’t be grasped, it’s
simply because a person bypassed an MU.”
While reading Scientology literature during a course or auditing session,
a member must demonstrate that they’ve fully understood every word in the
text by the church’s standards. You do this by grabbing a Scientology-
approved dictionary (they endorse a select few publishers) and looking up
each MU you cross. If any new MUs appear in the original MU’s entry, you
have to look those up, too—a dreaded process called a word chain—before
you can continue reading. From the most obscure polysyllabic term down to
the tiniest preposition,* every MU must be word-cleared. If you look up an
MU and still can’t word-clear it, you must track down its derivation, use it
in a sentence, then sculpt a physical demo of the sentence using Play-Doh.
These wearisome steps are all part of Hubbard’s teaching methodology,
Study Tech.
How does an auditor decide you’ve misunderstood a word? Telltale
signs might include displaying disinterest or fatigue (yawning, perhaps),
and certainly disputing something you’ve read. Once, Cathy descended into
a Word Clearing nightmare while reading a book called Science of Survival.
In it, there was a chapter condemning homosexuality. “I was like, ‘I don’t
get this,’ so they made me word-clear everything, until I finally was sent to
Ethics because I disagreed,” she recalled. The whole process was expensive
and defeating. “Can you imagine?” Cathy continued. “You’re in a course,
and you have one or two evenings a week to be in there, and you get stuck
on one word, which takes you the whole three hours to clear? At a certain
point, you don’t want to question stuff. You’re like, ‘Just go through it. Just
agree with it.’”
v.
Personally, when I think of cultish religious language, I don’t think of
kooky acronyms or mantras or Word Clearing. I think of one thing and one
thing only: speaking in tongues.
I’ve been haunted by this practice, desperately curious to understand it,
ever since I was fourteen and first watched the documentary Jesus Camp.
Filmed in North Dakota, Jesus Camp profiles a Pentecostal summer camp
where little kids learn how to “take back America for Christ.” My parents
rented the DVD in late 2006 and I watched it twice, back to back,
rubbernecking like mad, just to make sure I hadn’t hallucinated these adults
preaching the evils of evolution, public school, Harry Potter, homosexuality,
and abortion to kids barely old enough to read. In one scene, a perspiring
male preacher in his fifties repeats a quote from Doctor Seuss’s Horton
Hears a Who—“A person’s a person, no matter how small”—delivering a
pro-birth sermon with such emotional gravity that it brings the young
campers to tears. The preacher beckons the children to join him in a roaring
chant—“Jesus, I plead your blood over my sins and the sins of my nation.
God, end abortion and send revival to America.” He rouses them to demand
that God raise up righteous judges to overturn Roe v. Wade. The children
crowd around the preacher bellowing, “Righteous judges! Righteous
judges!” He places red tape over their mouths, scrawled with the word
“Life,” and they suspend their little palms in the air, pleading.
While that was all wildly engrossing to my fourteen-year-old self, by far
my favorite part of the movie was when the kids spoke in tongues. Scholars
tend to use the term “glossolalia” to describe this practice, in which a
person utters unintelligible sounds that seem to approximate words from
some perceived foreign language during states of religious intensity.
Glossolalia is commonly found in certain Christian sects like
Pentecostalism, in addition to fringier, more controversial religious groups
like The Way International.
Among believers, glossolalia is typically thought to be a heavenly gift.
Their belief is that the “words” pouring from the speaker’s mouth are from
an angelic or ancient holy language, which is then “translated” by someone
else, as interpretation is a separate gift. “What’s interesting is the reaction of
the person speaking glossolalia to the translation, because sometimes you
can tell they don’t like what the translator is saying, but they go ahead
anyway,” commented Paul de Lacy, a Rutgers University linguist and one
of the world’s only modern glossolalia scholars.
What researchers like de Lacy have found is that the words a glossolalia
speaker produces aren’t actually all that foreign. They’re not words you’d
find in a dictionary, but they do tend to follow the same phonetic and
phonological rules as the orator’s native tongue. So you wouldn’t be likely
to hear an English-speaking glossolalist start a word with the consonant
cluster /dl/, since this sound doesn’t exist in English (though it can be found
in other languages, like Hebrew). You’d also never hear, say, a Bulgarian
glossolalia speaker use a rhotic American /r/. And a glossolalist from
Yorkshire wouldn’t suddenly drop every last feature of their North English
lilt while speaking in tongues.
Glossolalia is a faith-based practice, so one can’t say in any scientific
way what it really is. But it is clear what glossolalia does. “The primary
function of glossolalia is group solidarity,” explains de Lacy. “The person’s
demonstrating they are part of the group.” Other science shows that
speaking in tongues just plain feels good—it’s the linguistic equivalent of
shaking your body around as a way to let loose. A 2011 report from the
American Journal of Human Biology found that glossolalia was associated
with reduced cortisol and elevated alpha-amylase enzyme activity, two
typical signs of stress reduction. It has also been found to lower inhibitions
and increase self-confidence, which is a side effect of religious chanting,
too. (A small 2019 study out of Hong Kong found that when compared to
non-religious chanting and resting states, Buddhist chanting generated brain
and heart activity associated with a lack of self-consciousness and feelings
of transcendent bliss.)
In a vacuum, there is technically nothing dangerous about glossolalia,
but in practice, it has a sinister side. In the mid-1970s, John P. Kildahl, a
psychologist and author of The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues,
observed that glossolalia seemed to provoke greater intensity of faith. This
was especially true when a person’s first time speaking in tongues occurred
right after a period of intense personal trauma (which Kildahl found to quite
often be the case). When someone’s debut glossolalia episode followed an
earth-shattering life change, they frequently formed a sense of dependence
on the experience. “Almost as a reason for one’s being,” said Kildahl. That
is to say, glossolalia can provoke a potent conversion event.
For multiple reasons, speaking in tongues can make a person quite
suggestible. Christopher Lynn, an author of that American Journal of
Human Biology study, determined that glossolalia is basically a form of
dissociation, a psychological state in which areas of conscious awareness
are separated. With dissociation, a person’s behaviors or experiences seem
to just happen all by themselves, outside of their control, as if in a trance.
There’s a wide spectrum of what scholars might classify as dissociation,
from severe cases of dissociative identity disorder all the way down to
common feelings of detachment, like searching all over for your phone
when it’s right in your hand, or zoning out while staring at a bonfire. But
dissociation can also present as self-deception, where appearances in
consciousness seem real despite evidence to the contrary. Under the
pressures of an ill-intentioned leader, glossolalia can compromise a
speaker’s ability to unsnarl the overwhelming metaphysical experience they
seem to be having from the guru’s influence.
In the end, glossolalia is a powerful emotional instrument—the ultimate
form of loaded language—and some religious higher-ups absolutely take
advantage. The Way International, a violent and controlling evangelical
Christian group, is famous for teaching its members that every true believer
can and should speak in tongues, as it is the “only visible and audible proof
that a man has been born again.” One anonymous ex-Way member recalled
a traumatic glossolalia experience from her childhood for the blog Yes and
Yes: “When I was 12, I was . . . required to speak in tongues in front of
everyone, and I was so shy I couldn’t do it,” she said. “The man hosting the
class . . . put his face very close to mine and essentially bullied me into
speaking in tongues.” The girl’s parents watched the interaction unfold from
across the room, benumbed by cognitive dissonance. “I was crying,” she
continued. “The man was inches from my face . . . using the language of
love in the most terrifying, bullying way.”
Say you’re a child like this Way International survivor was or one of the
Jesus Camp kids, who grew up in an oppressive religious environment and
only ever knew its language. You’d think these young folks would be
doomed; if “brainwashing” were real for anyone, it would have to be
impressionable kids. But the truth is that it’s still quite possible to develop a
sense of doubt, even when you’re very small and lack the access or
permission to describe it.
Just look at Flor Edwards. Now a writer in her thirties, Flor was raised
in one of the most notorious Christian doomsday cults in modern history,
the Children of God, which she documents in her memoir, Apocalypse
Child. Later renamed the Family International (for “branding” reasons), the
group was founded in California in 1968. Its leader, David Berg, known as
Father David, later ordered his followers to move to developing countries,
believing Western nations would be “first to burn in the fires of hell.” Along
with her parents and eleven siblings, Flor spent most of her ’80s-era
childhood in Thailand.
The Children of God is perhaps best known for its troubling convolution
of Christianity, love, and sex. As part of his dogma, Berg decreed that an
adult male follower was welcome to have sex with anyone, even underage
girls, a rule he euphemistically christened the “Law of Love.” The Children
of God was also infamous for its signature practice of flirty fishing.
Alliterative and innocent-sounding, “flirty fishing” could be the name of an
iPhone game. Instead, it was a mandate that female members recruit men
into the fold by seducing them with sex. “The media now refers to it as
‘prostitution for Jesus,’” Flor told me in an interview, a mild irritation in her
voice. “There’s a verse in the Bible that says, ‘Follow me and I’ll make you
fishers of men.’ It’s when Jesus is calling his disciples to, I guess, drop their
nets and follow him.” But Berg, who considered himself a prophetic
interpreter, decided the verse meant women had to go out and use their
bodies to “fish for men.” In the Children of God, “God is love, love is sex”
was a tagline everyone knew.
This juxtaposition of salaciousness and religion felt radical to Berg’s
hippie-minded flock. “He would cuss and swear. He was very informal. It
wasn’t like, ‘My dear followers, I’d like to take a moment to address blah,
blah, blah,’” Flor described. Berg’s adamant anticapitalism, anti-church
stance resonated with many ’70s-era seekers, who admired his philosophy
that Christianity needed a makeover—that the new church needed to
replace the old church. “Just like an old wife needed to be replaced with a
new wife,” relayed Flor. “He would literally say we were the young sexy
new bride for Jesus.”
This was the linguistic atmosphere in which Flor came of age, yet she
was still able to resist it, at least in her head. “I was born into the Children
of God, but there was definitely a part of me that always felt suspicious,
though I wasn’t allowed to voice that,” she said. Where did her suspicions
come from? “My gut,” she told me. “Sometimes it was just logic, like,
‘Wait, you’re saying this but then we’re doing that? Why do we have to
hide all the time? Why do we have to pretend like we’re in school?’ But the
bigger ones were really this protective instinct over my siblings. When I’d
see them treated a certain way, I knew it wasn’t right. You shouldn’t be
getting disciplined when you’re six months old. You shouldn’t be being
trained to be God’s ‘prostitutes for Jesus’ when you’re so young. No matter
what you call it.”
So even though it’s true that not everyone who joins and stays in an
abusive religion is troubled or unintelligent, it’s equally true that finding
yourself ears-deep in that kind of cultish quandry couldn’t happen to “just
anyone.” We’ll learn more about why some people have instincts like
Flor’s, and others don’t, in part 4.
vi.
I’ve heard the phrase “sexual nerds” used to describe people who are
into kink—feet, whips, that sort of thing. These folks can be thought of as
“nerds” because what they’re really doing is experimenting in corners of
sexual culture that might not be considered conventionally cool or
glamorous. Analogously, I like to think of certain cultish religious types as
“spiritual nerds.” They’re the people who geek out on niche theological
theories that others might not come across, who find themselves on a
lifelong journey of reckoning with their life purpose and are willing to look
outside the box to find it. “I’ve always been curious about the outskirts of
society,” Abbie Shaw, the ex-Shambhalan, told me. “I grew up in a
privileged family, a traditional synagogue, a big city. Now I’m a Buddhist
and work on Skid Row.”
There is nothing inherently wrong with spiritual nerdiness. Exploring
different belief systems, taking nothing you’ve learned in Sunday school for
granted, and coming to your own decisions is what so many twenty-first-
century young people are already doing, to varying degrees. As Abbie said,
“I’d been searching for a long time before Shambhala. I showed up and
thought, ‘Let’s just see where this goes.’” But Abbie still struggles with
how much unquestioned faith she had to put into her teachers. Sometimes
she flashes back to a chant she had to recite daily called “the supplication
for the Sakyong.” The chant reinforced members’ unending devotion to
their leader, Trungpa’s successor, asking the Buddha to prolong his life.
Abbie always had uneasy feelings about the Sakyong, and she bristled
against this obligation to ritualistically exalt him. At the same time, she
loved her community enough to assume the best and roll with it. Looking
back, she’s disturbed by how long her trust was drawn out: “It was never
supposed to be two years of my life,” she confessed.
Sticking with the kink metaphor, there’s only one way to have a
constructive, nontraumatizing experience using whips and bondage, and it’s
by having a key component down pat: consent. You have to have a safe
word so that your partner knows exactly when you want out. Kink
fundamentally doesn’t work without this. Metaphorically, you need a safe
word with religion, too. When you’re experimenting with faith and belief,
there has to be room to ask questions, express your misgivings, and seek
outside information, both early on and deep into your membership. “The
most important thing to remember is that if something is legitimate, it will
stand up to scrutiny,” Steven Hassan told me.
In 2018, Abbie had already decided to leave Shambhala when a
bombshell news story surfaced. That summer, the New York Times
published a series of grievous reports accusing the Sakyong of sexual
assault. A group of ex-Shambhala women united to bring forward their
testimonies about not just the Sakyong, but also some high-ranking
teachers. Abbie released a pensive exhale: “It was surreal to watch this
whole community crumble.”
Soon after the controversy, Abbie quietly slipped out of Vermont. Not
quite at the Scientology point along the influence continuum, Shambala’s
exit costs didn’t threaten her physical safety or all-out decimate her life; in a
way, her departure felt anticlimactic, like a balloon idly trickling to the
floor. She moved to Los Angeles to pursue a master’s in social work, and
now she practices a less hierarchical form of Buddhism. Abbie attends a
variety of meditation groups and then goes home to her own apartment,
which she shares with three roommates (“so I still get the communal
aspect,” she laughs). She has a mini altar in her room, and sometimes
privately draws on teachings she learned in Vermont. “I try to take what I
liked and leave the rest,” she said. “I’m still figuring out what to make of
everything that happened.”
Cathy Schenkelberg, too, dabbles in alternative spirituality, keeping a
healthy distance from Scientology and all her old relationships from that
time. After leaving the organization, she had to replace everyone in her life
—her friends, her agent, her manager, her accountant, her dentist, her
chiropractor—because they were all in the church. But sometimes, when
she least expects it, Cathy will overhear a Scientology term out in the
world, and those pangs of paranoia she felt for so many years suddenly
crackle through her nervous system. “I have a visceral reaction when fellow
ex-Scientologists use the terminology. It’s PTSD to me,” Cathy confessed.
“I say, ‘Out of respect, could you please not use Scientology language? It
upsets me.’ Here, I’ll use a word: It enturbulates me.”
My old Scientology confrère Mani and I haven’t seen each other much
since our personality test “kidnapping” nearly ten years ago, but I reached
out to her as soon as I began writing this chapter. She’s still in LA, doing
the acting thing. I realized I’d never gotten her take on that day’s events. I
started to fear that maybe my amygdala had caricatured the memory and
she’d long ago forgotten it. “Do you ever think about that experience?” I
texted her. Her response arrived quickly, in all caps: “I DO ALL THE
TIME.”
My most crystallized recollection from the ordeal was Mani’s
inexplicable calm and endurance. She just cheerfully went along with the
whole thing for hours, like fully committing to a hammy acting bit—with
me, the wet blanket foil, begging to bail. But Mani recalls being far more
distressed. “I remember how they kept us separated,” she messaged back. “I
remember a woman telling me (sternly) that it would be very quick (it
wasn’t), not to be afraid to be truthful with myself as this was the only way
they could properly assess what I would need, and that ‘me and my friend
would be back together before we knew it.’” Mani revealed that over the
past decade, she’s had other, more frightening Scientology encounters. But
our personality test was “the real introduction.”
I suppose for aspiring actors in Los Angeles, or dreamers anywhere,
really, it’s something of an occupational hazard: Whether you’re on a quest
for spiritual enlightenment, eternal salvation, or a Tom Cruise level of
renown so powerful that you essentially become a god on Earth, devoting
your life to something so behemoth that heaven itself is on the line requires
big risks, tough commitments, and a pretty intense suspension of reality to
believe it’s possible. The stakes are just that high. In some cases, you get
out within a few hours, a little bit shaken; in others, you lose everything.
But there is always a story.
As soon as you get your language back, you can tell it.
i.
Roses are red
Money is green
The American Dream
Is a pyramid scheme
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* * *
I’m ears-deep into one of those miserable Facebook benders—a
stalkerish wormhole where all of a sudden, I’ve found myself terribly
invested in what someone I don’t even know wore to prom in 2008—when
a few rogue clicks lead me to a post I never thought I’d see: Becca Manners
from middle school is trying to sell a weight loss scam to her 3,416
“friends.”
I first met Becca, the most self-possessed tween girl in all of Baltimore
County to my knowledge, in rehearsals for our seventh-grade musical.
Becca and I bonded over some dirty joke and were tight all the way through
twelfth grade. We ignored the school dress code together, scream-sang
Alanis Morissette in the car together, had a million sleepovers, and now
here we are, age twenty-seven and 2,700 miles apart, judging each other’s
lives on social media. Becca and I haven’t spoken in almost a decade, but
my periodic internet lurkings tell me that she’s married, sober, living up the
road from her parents, and wants all her Facebook friends, including me—
currently in LA, inhaling an overpriced cocktail and a gust of car exhaust—
to ask her about her new #wellness business opportunity.
It’s early summer when photos of my old pal sorority-squatting next to
bags of sugar to represent the pounds she’s quickly shed start spamming my
newsfeed. All the photos are accompanied by vague captions like “Feeling
amazing and my journey is just getting started! #sugarshotresults.” She
never says exactly what the product is or who she’s working for, but I can
tell just by her hazily inspirational status updates, forced exclamation
points, and nebulous hashtags that it could be nothing but the perky dialect
of direct sales. “Welp, another one bites the dust,” I text my current best
friend, Esther, who grew up in Florida and can name a dozen ex–high
school classmates of her own who’ve been sucked into the same “cult” as
Becca: the cult of Multilevel Marketing.
Multilevel marketing, network marketing, relationship marketing, direct
sales . . . there are at least half a dozen synonyms for MLMs, the legally
loopholed sibling of pyramid schemes. At once a pillar of Western
capitalism but relegated to the fringes of our workforce, MLMs are pay-
and-recruit organizations powered not by salaried employees but
“affiliates.” These are largely white-male-founded, white-female-operated
beauty and “wellness” brands whose recruits peddle overpriced products
(from face cream to essential oils to diet supplements) to their friends and
family, while also trying to enlist those customers to become sellers
themselves. MLM pitches always follow a similar script: They feature talk
of this “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to be the “boss babe” you really
are, “start your own business,” and “make a full-time income working part-
time from home” to gain the “financial independence” you’ve always
wanted. American MLMs number in the hundreds: Amway, Avon, and
Mary Kay are among the best recognized, alongside Herbalife, Young
Living Essential Oils, LuLaRoe, LipSense, dōTERRA, Pampered Chef,
Rodan + Fields, Scentsy, Arbonne, Younique, and the iconic Tupperware.
When I think of the typical MLM recruit, I think of women like Becca
—middle-class shiksas from my high school who stayed in our hometown
(or moved to Florida . . . always Florida), got married young, had babies
shortly thereafter, and spend an impressive sum of hours on Facebook. A
year or several into stay-at-home motherhood, they get roped into hawking
the slimy serums of Rodan + Fields, paper-thin leggings of LuLaRoe, or
something similar (you name it, I’ve seen it in my newsfeed). Most MLMs
target nonworking wives and moms, and they have since the dawn of the
modern direct sales industry in the 1940s. Direct sales advertising has
always riffed on whatever “female empowerment” buzzwords were trendy
at the time. While midcentury MLM recruitment language promised that
Tupperware was “the best thing that’s happened to women since they got
the vote!” in the age of social media, it plays on the fauxspirational lingo of
commodified fourth-wave feminism.
Modern MLM language is defined by the sort of snappy, uplifting
quotes you might find printed in flouncy bridesmaid cursive on Pinterest:
“You got this, boss babe”; “Channel your inner #girlboss”; “Build a
fempire”; “Be a mompreneur”; “#WFH so you can make money like the
SHE-E-O you are without having to leave your kids!!” These phrases work
initially to love-bomb potential sellers; then, over time, they become loaded
with the weight of the American Dream itself, conditioning followers to
believe that “giving up” on the business would mean giving up on your very
life’s purpose. In the early days, direct sellers introduced their overpriced,
chemical-smelling trinkets in person, hosting at-home product
demonstrations called “parties.” But these days, many women choose to
kick it new school and parade their goods across social media, as their
snarky former classmates cringe-scroll past. My best friend Esther is a
twenty-six-year-old Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor who posts a lot about
cancer-free living and radiates just the breed of health-conscious positivity
many MLMs enjoy exploiting. She gets one or two Instagram DMs a week
from different direct sales recruiters trying to seduce her into the flock.
“Hey girlboss!!! Love your content!!! You’re such a badass!!! Have you
ever thought about turning your cancer journey into a business?!?!” She
screenshots them all, sends them to me, and deletes.*
As far as I’m concerned, an MLM is to a pyramid scheme as a
Starbucks Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino is to a straight-up milkshake:
One is just a glorified version of the other—an assertion that would
scandalize any devoted MLMer. “I would NEVER be involved with a
pyramid scheme. Pyramid schemes are ILLEGAL,” they tend to say as their
stock defense. This phrase is a thought-terminating cliché, and it’s an
amusing one, because if you take the logic even one step further, it becomes
obvious that simply saying something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s not real or
that you’re not involved. You can’t rob a bank and then, when accused, just
say, “I didn’t do it, robbing banks is illegal,” to prove your innocence. In the
city of Mobile, Alabama, it’s against the law to throw plastic confetti, but
that doesn’t mean plastic confetti doesn’t exist or that people don’t use it.
Sometimes citizens of Mobile throw plastic confetti without knowing it’s
illegal, and sometimes they know plastic confetti is illegal but use it anyway
because they don’t realize the confetti they’re using is made of plastic.
Either way, it’s still a thing, and it’s still not cool.
Pyramid schemes are indeed outlawed, and for good reason. They have
the capacity to cheat people out of a couple hundred dollars or drive them
all the way to bankruptcy and despair. They can shatter entire communities,
even national economies, like those of Albania and Zimbabwe, which have
been decimated by schemes both pyramid and Ponzi. It’s no surprise, then,
that pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as such. Instead, these
companies hide in plain sight behind all sorts of euphemistic labels: gifting
circles (also called looms, lotuses, or fractal mandalas), investment clubs,
and, most commonly, multilevel marketing companies—MLMs for short.
Like the challenge of distinguishing between a religion and a cult, there
are few objective distinctions between pyramid schemes and “legit” MLMs.
In theory, the difference seems to be that members of MLMs like Avon and
Amway chiefly earn compensation from selling a particular good or service,
while pyramid schemes primarily compensate members for recruiting new
sellers as quickly as possible. But in practice, a pyramid scheme is
essentially just an MLM that was run poorly and got caught (more on that
shortly).
Both organizations are set up like this: A company’s charismatic
founder starts by love-bombing a small group of people into accepting an
invitation to start their own business. Unlike typical entrepreneurship,
there’s no education or work experience necessary to get involved; the offer
is open to anybody who really wants to “change their life.”
There is no base salary—that would make this a job and you an
employee. The MLM makes sure to charge these words so they trigger
images of bureaucratic indentured servitude and misery. Instead, you earn a
small commission for whatever product you personally manage to unload.
That makes this a “business opportunity” and you an “entrepreneur.” Much
better.
Only two steps are required to get you started on this simple path to
financial freedom: First, purchase a starter kit containing samples and
marketing materials, which will cost you anywhere from $50 to $10,000 or
more. Pennies, either way, for a new business owner’s initial start-up cost.
Opening up a store or launching an e-commerce brand is so expensive, but
getting in on this movement? Practically free when you think about it.
Next step: Each month, recruit ten new members (sometimes it’s less,
but often it’s not) to join your team, which you’ll want to give a jaunty
nickname like the Diamond Squad or the Good Vibe Tribe, or maybe
something cheeky like You Win Some, You Booze Some. This will help
everyone feel bonded. Then, encourage each of those members to recruit
ten monthly sellers of their own. You’ll take a small cut of all the earnings
underneath you (from the starter kits and inventory your recruits purchase,
and also from their product sales). The generation of sellers below you is
called your “downline,” while the person who recruited you is your
“upline.” Meanwhile, the MLM founder, sitting pretty at the very top of this
tetrahedron, takes a cut of everything.
In order to move product and grow a downline, you’ll need to spread
the word about your amazing new business to everyone you know. To do
this, you’ll be encouraged to host lots of parties, both IRL and online.
You’ll want to buy snacks and wine, or spend hours concocting cute virtual
activities to incentivize attendance. You’ll beseech guests to thumb through
the brochures and lotions or whatever in hopes that they’ll buy something,
or—better yet—want to sign up to sell the stuff themselves. It doesn’t
matter if the company’s products are any good or fill a market demand, and
neither does the fact that zero sales experience is required to come aboard.
The typical rules of economics do not apply here. The system is promised
to work no matter what. As long as you pay the buy-in fee, follow the
company’s path precisely, and don’t ask too many questions, the American
Dream itself will be yours.
This pay-and-recruit pattern continues for each new group of recruits,
affiliates, consultants, distributors, guides, ambassadors, presenters,
coaches, or whichever entrepreneurial-sounding title the company chooses
for its enrollees, who are made to feel special and chosen, even though
literally anyone who ponies up can join. Money from recent joinees siphons
to their upline, helping those above meet their monthly or quarterly sales
quotas, which are disguised with friendlier-sounding labels like “goals” and
“targets.” Fail to reach these periodic minimums? Expect to be demoted or
kicked out of the company. That can’t happen. You’d let everyone down,
especially yourself. So, you might end up just buying all the inventory
personally and eating the cost, with your eyes fixed firmly on the prize: to
ascend the company’s structure, a geometric shape that would certainly
never be described as a pyramid with levels, but instead maybe a “ladder”
with “rungs.” Surely, next month you’ll find tons of recruits, achieve your
goals, and finally be awarded a ritzier title: Senior Consultant, Head Coach,
Sales Director.
“There’s a lot of discussion around what I would describe as the
purchase of hope,” analyzed Stacie Bosley, an economics professor at
Hamline University in Minnesota. Bosley is one of the only financial
researchers in the world who formally studies MLMs. Evidently, the male-
dominated field of economics doesn’t seem to think an industry dominated
by #girlbosses would be a hotbed of academic intrigue. (How wrong they
are.) “Sometimes the MLM industry will even acknowledge that really what
people are buying is a form of hope,” Bosley says. It’s part of why most
MLM recruitment language is so grandiose and indirect—they avoid
technical terms like “investment” and “employment,” favoring aspirational
phrases like “amazing opportunity” and “empowering activity.”
But these sugarcoated code words are hiding some really sketchy
numbers. As these generations of downlines all grow, the market rapidly
becomes overcrowded with everyone and their mother (literally) mining the
same saturated communities, trying and failing to enlist newbies underneath
them. The number of hopefuls expands exponentially from a small
profitable few at the peak to a screwed-over mass at the base. If the MLM’s
model, which your upline and founder endorsed over and over at all their
business opportunity presentations and millionaire workshops, goes
perfectly to plan, then yes, you will become rich within a year . . . but
according to basic math, guess how many people will be in your downline
by the end of those twelve months? Over a trillion. That’s 142 times the
world population, and a whole lot of diet pills.
Study after study shows that 99 percent of MLM recruits never make a
dime, and the lucky 1 percent at the top only profits at everyone else’s
expense. The calculations speak for themselves, but even if you’re totally in
the red, with an empty bank account and a storage locker full of eye cream
nobody wants, at least you get to stay a part of your team—your “family”—
whose fellow recruits you might call your sisters and whose leaders you
might even refer to as Mom and Dad. By this point, you’ve developed a
deeply emotional, codependent bond with these people. You text with them
all day. You’re in secret Facebook groups together. You have weekly
meetings via video chat, where you all drink pink wine (“because you
earned it!”) and spill your souls to each other. You save up all year to attend
the company’s costly conferences so you can see your fellow boss babes in
person.
So, you’ll likely choose to ignore your damages, forget the math, and
hold out, especially since you were emphatically promised a big payday at
the end of all this. Plus, everyone above and beneath you is counting on you
to make money. If you give up now, you’ll disappoint your Diamond Squad.
You’ll disappoint your family and your “family.” You’ll disappoint God.
You won’t be a #girlboss anymore. You’ll be nothing. Under that kind of
pressure, things can get undeniably cultish.
MLMs are scammy, but they aren’t just your average scams. They’re
complex, life-consuming organizations with a language and culture all their
own. MLMs have strong and pervasive ideologies that are missionary in
character, and members revere their founding leaders, who share a desire
not just to run a successful company but to rule the free world, on the level
of religious worship. The famous University of Chicago sociologist Edward
Shils defined “cult charisma” as “whenever an individual is understood to
be connected with crucial questions of human existence.” To this degree,
MLM leaders are as influential as 3HO’s Yogi Bhajan and Shambhala’s
Chögyam Trungpa. They convert you with compliments and exclamation
points and fauxspiration. They condition and coerce you with loaded
buzzwords (often invoking God), and they use thought-terminating clichés
to silence dissent. They train you to employ these same techniques with
everyone you know, at every turn.
MLMs wield us-versus-them verbiage to tightly bond their followers
and frame them as better than traditionally employed Americans. At
Amway, the world’s biggest MLM, anyone who works for an “employer” as
opposed to an upline mentor is said, with disdain, to have a J.O.B., a
“jackass of a boss.” “When you work for someone else, you will never get
paid what you’re worth,” Amway’s recruits are all taught to say. To
MLMers, the word “entrepreneur” represents not just a career but a
“morally superior way of being in the economy,” comments Nicole
Woolsey Biggart, a UC Davis sociologist and author of Charismatic
Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America.
MLMs gaslight you into believing that if you follow their flawless
system and don’t succeed, there is simply something wrong with you.
“Every willing and hardworking person can be successful in this
business . . . a good system always works!” is a thought-terminating cliché
pulled directly from Amway’s handbook. Known for its extreme
juxtaposition of motivational buzzwords with dark threats of failure, MLM
language conditions you to think that if you’re not swimming in cash, it’s
not the company’s fault—it’s yours. You didn’t have enough faith or
perseverance to unlock your potential and earn what should’ve been a
guarantee. There are countless MLM vision boards all across the web,
featuring emotionally manipulative platitudes like “People often fail in
MLMs before they ever begin because the approach is from the head, not
the heart,” and “I really hate when broke people who don’t work complain
about being broke. #billionairemindset.” In an article titled “Top 50 MLM
Quotes of All Time,” the website OnlineMLMCommunity.com showcases a
litany of misattributed inspirational quotes, including this axiom, falsely
associated with Winston Churchill: “The pessimist sees difficulty in every
opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”—as if the
British statesman’s successes had anything to do with direct sales, even if
the quote really were his.
“It was like mental warfare,” reflects Hannah, a former “presenter” at
the Christian makeup MLM Younique, on her experience being gaslit by the
company. As a college student, Hannah blew $500 on inventory before
getting kicked out of the company for failing to meet her sales quota. “If I
was in a situation where I didn’t have [my] university, a partner, and other
community groups . . . I would have felt so awful about myself. . . . Being
told you’re not good enough multiple times a day could ruin some people.”
In the end, MLMs aren’t in the business of selling start-up ventures to
entrepreneurs. Like most destructive “cults,” they’re in the business of
selling the transcendent promise of something that doesn’t actually exist.
And their commodity isn’t merchandise, it’s rhetoric. For many recruits
who never sell a single product, the entire MLM experience consists of
committing to a community, proudly calling yourself a consultant,
conferencing into team pump-up calls, and attending expensive
conventions. The numbers don’t make sense, but the words keep you there
anyway.
Several months after Becca Manners’s weight loss posts suddenly
disappeared from my Facebook feed, I decided to send her a cautiously
worded message. I knew I had to tread lightly. Had Becca lost everything
and was too embarrassed to admit publicly that she’d been duped? Had the
MLM forced her into silence with veiled or explicit threats? Had she
secretly made out like a bandit and didn’t want to reveal herself as a
scammer? “Terribly sorry if this seems random, but am I remembering
correctly that you’ve been involved with direct sales endeavors in the past?”
I wrote. “I’m writing about the language of multilevel marketing and would
love to hear about your experience.”
In all of Becca’s “after” photos, she exuded health and happiness, but
combine the rules of MLM membership with the universal desire to look
flawless on social media, and it could have easily been a lie. To my delight,
she responded within the hour:
Omg of course I’ll talk about it! I did a diet program last year called Optavia. And that
shit was legit a crazy cult.
“Oh, goodie,” I replied.
ii.
Heyyyyy boss babe! Thank you soooooo much for responding!! I really think you’ll be a
perfect fit for this! I don’t have much info to send via DM, the only website I have is for
my current clients, but we have several different plans available depending on what
you’re looking to accomplish. We treat our clients like family, so it’s really important I
have the right information before moving forward, and I won’t know what’s best until we
chat. The call will only take about 20 minutes :) I’m so excited to share more!! xoxo
* * *
To me, MLMs’ ra-ra speech style—the excessive exclamation points
and “Just believe in yourself, and you can become rich”—reeks of toxic
positivity . . . or forcing a silver lining around an experience that is actually
quite complex, upsetting, and deserving of more careful attention.
In the messaging of every single MLM I looked into, from Amway to
Optavia, there was this startling hybrid of love-bomb-y talk about the power
of a positive mind-set and ominous warnings about the danger of a negative
one. On its face, promoting a chin-up attitude to your business associates
might sound good and fine, but MLMs condition their recruits to fear
“negativity” so viscerally that they avoid breathing a word of criticism
about the company or anyone in it. “You don’t gossip. You don’t say bad
things about other people. If they hear you doing it, or hear about you doing
it, you will hear from your director,” cautioned one ex-Amway distributor.
Amway labels any attitudes or utterances they don’t like “stinkin’ thinkin’.”
Using this deceptively cute catchphrase, they’re able to isolate followers
from any stinkin’ thinkers on the outside, who will pose a threat to their
success. If a friend or family member expresses doubt in the company,
you’re instructed to “snip them out of your life.”
Followers become conditioned to speak in the MLM’s unnaturally
cheerful register everywhere they go—with friends, family, strangers, and
especially on social media. On Instagram and Facebook, you can clock a
boss babe instantly, whether they explicitly mention a product or not. All it
takes is that robotically chirpy syntax to give them away. It’s as if someone
is standing behind them as they type, cracking a symbolic whip to make
sure they’re always selling and recruiting, even if they’re just posting about
their dog. Like followers of an oppressive religion, MLM recruits wind up
trapped in ritual time.
Whenever I hear this too-good-to-be-true-type rhetoric, my gut tells me
to run like hell. And yet as good as it might feel to write off anyone who
buys the grandiloquent poppycock of direct sales as a hopeless dunce, the
truth is that this toxically positive rhetoric is fundamentally baked into
American society. The cult of multilevel marketing is a direct product of the
“cult” that is Western capitalism itself.
In the United States, networking marketing as we know it got its start in
the 1930s, post–Great Depression, as a reaction to employment regulations
introduced by the New Deal. Although it wasn’t until a few years later, after
World War II, that the direct sales industry really exploded. That’s when it
became a women’s game.
During WWII, women entered the workforce in unprecedented droves
while men fought abroad. But after the fighting ended, those women were
sent back into the home to care for their children and veteran husbands. In
the 1950s, twenty million Americans migrated to suburbia, where there
were few job opportunities for women, many of whom missed the
excitement, independence, fulfillment, and cash that came with professional
life.
It was around this time when a businessman named Earl Tupper
invented a type of sturdy polyethylene food storage container. He named it
Tupperware. The product hadn’t exactly been flying off shelves until a
single mother from Detroit with a knack for direct sales named Brownie
Wise (real name) got ahold of Tupper’s wares and decided not only would
suburban moms make the perfect consumers for this stuff, they could make
a powerful sales force, too. Wise and Tupper joined forces, and the at-home
“Tupperware party” was born.
Long before the invention of the hashtag, Wise used pseudo-female-
empowerment verbiage to recruit women into her network of dealers,
managers, and distributors. This set the stage for a long future of faux-
feminist MLM claptrap. “A Tupperware career is so rewarding!” reads one
vintage ad in cherry-red cursive. The illustrated poster depicts a high-
society woman with corn-colored hair, pearl earrings, and a cashmere
sweater. Holding a book (though not reading it), she smiles deliriously
while gazing up out of frame at what I can only assume are her dreams.
“Earnings begin immediately when you become a Tupperware dealer!”
cheeps another ’40s-era sketch of a different jolly white lady. “You can earn
as much as you want. You earn while you learn. You are an independent
business owner. Your own boss. . . . There is nothing quite like the
opportunity you have for earnings as a Tupperware dealer—NOW!”
Over the following decades, direct sales kingpins followed in Wise’s
footsteps, angling their products and language toward white stay-at-home
moms. They filled women’s ears with promises of financial independence,
the sort that wouldn’t threaten their traditionally feminine, wifely image. To
this day, unemployed women, especially those living in blue-collar towns,
continue to make up the majority of MLM recruits.
Quickly, the direct selling industry figured out how to target other
communities locked out of the dignified labor market. Immigrant Spanish
speakers, inexperienced college students, and economically marginalized
Black folks became additional targets. The industry takes advantage of the
trust that already exists within tight-knit groups like churches, military
bases, and college campuses. Their ideal recruit is one who is striving for
financial stability and has a proven track record of faith and optimism,
whether it’s hope for a fresh start in a new country, youthful enthusiasm for
the future, or belief in a higher power. The typical MLM joinee isn’t some
greedy jerk looking to get rich quick; they’re an everyday person looking to
pay their basic bills. A blend of monetary struggle, close community, and
idealism is the jackpot for any upline.
Christian communities wind up being a hotbed for MLMs, many of
which actively identify themselves as “faith-based”: Mary & Martha,
Christian Bling, Younique, Thirty-One Gifts, and Mary Kay are just a few
of the many MLMs that lead with an explicitly religious credo. In dozens of
American neighborhoods, you’ll find salt-of-the-earth people holding the
Bible in one hand and pricey lotion samples in the other. It’s why the state
of Utah is home to more MLM headquarters than anywhere else in the
world—Mormons, as direct sales leaders have discovered, are an ideal sales
force. “Latter-day Saints are born and bred to be missionaries . . . so
preaching the gospel to friends often naturally flows with selling MLM
products to their friends,” a source told the investigative podcast The
Dream. “When your uncle comes to you and says, ‘I have this great life-
changing opportunity,’ sometimes it sounds a lot like a message you would
hear at church.”
Religion has been intertwined with MLMs—and with American labor
culture in general—since before the United States even existed. The
marriage of godly blessings and monetary “blessings” goes back half a
millennium to the Protestant Reformation. Sociologists attribute the dawn
of modern capitalism to this sixteenth-century movement, which gave birth
to so many of our contemporary American workplace values, like the basic
idea of “a good day’s work,” “keeping your nose to the grindstone,”* and
“the good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse.” Protestant Reformers,
especially French theologian John Calvin, conceived of the idea that God
plays a role not just in human beings’ spiritual successes and failures but
also in our financial ones. This idea helped create the “Protestant ethic,”
marked by diligent work, individual effort, and accumulation of wealth,
which aligned perfectly with Europe’s emerging capitalist economy.
Soon, everyone began aspiring to the new ideal of a pious, self-reliant
entrepreneur. As professional labor became central to Christian life, the
ability to call yourself a skilled, hardworking breadwinner indicated that
you were a member of God’s elect. So the “spirit of capitalism,” with all its
high highs and low lows, embedded in most Westerners’ value systems. So
much capitalist vernacular—from the “sacred” stock market bell to the
“almighty dollar”—continues to have religious overtones . . . a ghost of the
Protestant Reformation.
By the 1800s, the Protestant ethic had spread to America, but it had
evolved a touch. Now riches weren’t perceived so much as a gift from God,
but as a reward for independent achievement and a sign of good character.
This revised Protestant ethic stressed ambition, tenacity, and competition,
which jibed with the rise of industrial capitalism (defined by mass
manufacturing and a clearer division of labor). The nineteenth century also
saw the rise of a philosophical movement called New Thought, which gave
us popular self-improvement ideas like the law of attraction. During this
time, rags-to-riches stories like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper
and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations emerged as best-sellers. The first
“self-help” book—aptly titled Self-Help—was published in 1859 to
blockbuster success. It opened with the line “Heaven helps those who help
themselves” and claimed poverty to be a result of personal irresponsibility.
This new mind-over-matter attitude that you could control your own
destiny, that you could govern everything from your career to your physical
health just by believing in yourself, contributed to what we now think of as
the American Dream.
Over the course of the next century, the Protestant ideal changed once
more with the rise of big American business: Carnegie Steel, the
Rockefellers’ Standard Oil, Chicago’s Union Stock Yards meatpacking
district. In the twentieth century, independent success and competitiveness
were downplayed as it became admirable to get along with your coworkers,
hobnob with them, and work your way up the corporate ladder. At this
stage, New Thought could be found in books and courses on how to
become a great company man: How to Win Friends and Influence People,
Think and Grow Rich, and The Power of Positive Thinking were all
published between 1935 and 1955.
Throughout the mid-twentieth century, the message that happy thoughts
and a healthy ego could make you rich swept America’s churches. The
Power of Positive Thinking was written by the famous minister Norman
Vincent Peale, who ran a conservative Protestant church in New York City
called Marble Collegiate. There, Peale preached the “prosperity gospel” to a
congregation of mostly wealthy, influential Manhattanites—including, and
especially, a young Donald Trump. (By no coincidence, Trump grew up to
become a hard-core MLM enthusiast.) Known for his inspiring self-help
oratory, Peale evangelized sentiments like “Empty pockets never held
anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that,” and
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but
reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or
happy.”
You can hear Peale’s influence in Donald Trump’s speeches and social
media posts half a century later. “Success tip: See yourself as victorious.
This will focus you in the right direction. Apply your skills and talent—and
be tenacious,” Trump tweeted in 2013. Upon launching his presidential
campaign in 2016, Trump’s rants about self-reliance took a more paranoid
turn. Early that year, when asked who he consults on foreign policy, he
replied, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very
good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing. . . . My
primary consultant is myself.”
From this complex history, the MLM—the uncanny lovechild of
Protestantism, capitalism, and corporatization—was conceived. The
Protestant ethic remains very much a part of professional culture as a whole
in the United States, and we all grow up internalizing its rhetoric—work
hard, play hard; another day, another dollar. My partner and I have an
extensive collection of coffee mugs embellished with little sayings, and the
other day, I looked up and noticed for the first time that they all just
shamelessly evangelize toxic productivity dogma: One mug says “Sleep is
for the weak”; another reads “A yawn is just a silent scream for coffee.” A
silent scream? Are we all so conditioned to believe it’s romantic to be
overworked and exhausted, so terrified of leisure and “laziness,” that we
print cute jokes about it on drinkware? In twenty-first-century America,
apparently so.
The language of Protestant capitalism is everywhere—all the way down
to our coffee mugs—but it plays a starring role in the MLM industry, which
at once indulges Americans’ most quixotic aspirations and their gravest
fears. It’s especially pronounced in the way MLMs stress meritocracy, the
idea that money and status are individually earned. Meritocracy is founded
on the tenet that people can control their lives in big ways, that as long as
they really try, they can pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.
Americans love the mythology that successful people deserve their success
while struggling people are simply less worthy. MLM recruits, whose
“success” is entirely based on commission from selling and recruiting,
relish this notion even more. Per MLM ideology, no win is unearned,
regardless of what or who is sacrificed to achieve it. And no failure is
undeserved, either.
The majority of direct sales propaganda I’ve read emphasizes the
“blood, sweat, tears, heart, and soul” necessary to build a sales team, urging
sellers to view their efforts as a badge of patriotic honor and to wear it with
a smile. Countless MLMs invoke nationalistic slogans to reinforce the idea
that enlisting to be a #bossbabe means signing up to serve your country.
One diet supplement MLM is literally named American Dream Nutrition;
another is called United Sciences of America, Inc. Amway, which sells
home goods and personal hygiene products like soap and toothpaste, is a
portmanteau of “American Way.”
Plenty of modern companies try to sell goods by associating them with
larger identity benefits, like by buying this trendy lip gloss or that beach
towel made out of recycled plastic, you will establish yourself as a hip,
healthy, sexy, ecofriendly person in general. Sociologists call these
“organizational ideologies,” and they’re not necessarily all bad. Most
successful brand founders agree that having a “cultlike company culture”
with intense values and rituals is simply necessary to secure repeat
customers and loyal employees in today’s dubious, transient market. These
organizational ideologies should be taken with a grain of salt, of course,
since basing one’s politics, healthcare decisions, and very identity on what
profit-driven brands have to say, even (and especially) ones that self-
identify as “ethical,” “sustainable,” etc., is risky business. “Woke
capitalism” does not equal social justice, just as hawking diet pills to your
Facebook friends does not make you heavenly blessed.
By nature, MLMs take their organizational ideologies way further than
most other companies, linking themselves not just to everyday earthly
benefits but to the very meaning of life. Direct sales slogans boast
spiritually charged promises like “Being Younique is better than being
perfect” and “Existing and living are not the same thing. Choose one.” A
Pinterest graphic created by the essential oils MLM dōTERRA lists the
recipe for a “forgiveness” blend that will allow consumers to “become
empathetic, forgiving, freeing, light, loving, tolerant, understanding.”
Before his death, one of Amway’s billionaire cofounders, Jay Van Andel,
vowed that involvement with his company “gets people into a new life of
excitement, promise, profit, and hope.”
You might think that an industry as unhip and retro-seeming as direct
sales might have gone out of style already. It’s hard to believe it’s survived
the internet, where so many ex-MLMers put these companies on blast,
spilling their stories of psychological abuse and money loss. Search “MLM
scam” on YouTube, and endless pages of videos like “The MLM ‘Girl
Boss’ Narrative Is a Lie,” “I Filed for Bankruptcy After LuLaRoe and Now
Work 2 Jobs,” and “AMWAY: The Final Straw (with Audio EVIDENCE!)
—How I Quit My MLM Cult” accumulate millions of views. Anti-MLMers
occupy passionate nooks of Instagram and TikTok. In 2020, TikTok banned
MLM recruiters from the platform altogether. There is no shortage of
incriminating evidence against the #bossbabe industrial complex.
And yet MLM rhetoric is such a successful assault on the human spirit,
so consistently compelling and adaptable, that these companies only
continue to thrive. In the 2010s, as ingredient-conscious millennials began
overtaking the consumer market and demand for “all-natural” “nontoxic”
personal care products increased, the shrewdest MLM founders
accommodated. Direct sales wasn’t just for old-school Suzy Homemakers
anymore, it was for the savvy youth. “Clean beauty” MLMs with chicer,
updated packaging pivoted to populating their seller bases with “micro-
influencers”—women with small blogs and a few thousand social media
followers who could be tempted by an unctuous DM about how their feed is
amazinggg and would they like to add a second stream of income while
becoming part of the clean beauty “movement”?! Pairing deliciously with
the glamorous image of a self-employed influencer, this hipper generation
of MLMs pitched itself as the perfect side hustle. The nimble direct sales
industry always finds a way to reinvent itself—the capitalist cockroach that
just won’t stop reincarnating.
iii.
Hey lady! Just wanted to send a reminder that we’re in the business of changing lives
here!! Yes, we’re making money, but it’s so much bigger than that . . . it’s a
MOVEMENT. People deserve to be a part of it, they just don’t know it yet, so it’s up to
you to show them the light!! You need to be reaching out to EVERYBODY . . . family,
friends, Insta followers, the person behind you in line at Starbucks. Start up a
conversation, and meet them where they’re at. Our products basically sell themselves,
so if you’re not meeting your goals, you need to work HARDER and SMARTER like the
boss babe you are. You have such potential. Don’t let me down, but more importantly,
don’t let YOURSELF down!! xoxo
* * *
When my middle school friend Becca and I finally got on a call to talk
about her MLM experience, it had been a decade since I’d last heard her
voice. Becca, now twenty-eight, lives in a little white country house in
Maryland with her husband, two dogs, and four cats. She works a nine-to-
five and still plays the same local singing gig she did in high school—
Friday nights at Backstage BBQ Cafe. She goes to AA several times a week
and spends most evenings playing with her baby niece. “I know, look
what’s become of me,” she quipped, sporting that old Becca sarcasm and
the cozy fronted vowels of our hometown’s accent, which I never get to
hear anymore.
Becca knew from the jump that Optavia (formerly called Medifast) was
a shifty venture. She could hear it. “All that marketing mumbo-jumbo? It
was so cringe,” she affirmed. I guess I could have predicted Becca wouldn’t
be one of those wide-eyed hopefuls who accidentally finds themselves at
the bottom of a pyramid scheme. Becca was well aware of Optavia’s tricky
setup, but she was also confident she could game it by tapping into her
massive network of Facebook friends. “I one hundred percent knew it was a
cult,” she said. “But I was like, ‘Whatever, I’ll jump on that wagon.’ Like,
let’s scam, you know?”
“Sure, sure.” I gulped.
Optavia is a weight loss program that delivers prepackaged meals to
consumers’ homes, like Nutrisystem or BistroMD. “They definitely try to
reel you in by saying all that ‘Be your own boss. Work from home’ shit.”
Becca eye-rolled through the phone. Several of Becca’s friends were
involved with the controversial MLM LuLaRoe, a billion-dollar leggings
company that the Washington State attorney general sued for pyramid
scheme activity in 2019. (As of the time of this writing, the case is pending
trial.) Becca saw how wolfishly it consumed their lives, how much money
they were hemorrhaging. But when her mother-in-law asked her to do
Optavia, whose buy-in fees and quotas were relatively low, it seemed like
the right MLM at the right time.
About a year prior, Becca’s fiancé had been diagnosed with a rare blood
cancer before the age of thirty. When he finally finished chemo and entered
remission, Becca was spent: “I had put on a fuck-ton of weight because I
was taking care of him. I was depressed, recently sober. And I’d just quit
smoking cigs, which will make you fat in and of itself.” Her husband’s
mom was an Optavia seller and had lost a bunch of weight following the
program, but because it was so expensive, about $400 a month, Becca never
considered doing it herself. Then her mother-in-law floated an idea by her:
If Becca signed up to be a “coach,” posted about her weight loss journey on
Facebook a couple of times a week, and got a few other people to sign up,
that would pay for her food. “She didn’t try any of that boss babe shit on
me, she just told me what was up,” said Becca. “I was like, ‘Cool, yeah, I
can get some other people to sign up, give them the spiel.’”
Becca enrolled as a coach, paid the $100 start-up fee, and commenced
the diet: “The way it works, you lose weight quick. I lost fifty pounds in
four months,” she confessed. “I mean, the second I stopped eating their
food, I looked at a pizza and gained five pounds. It’s not realistic to keep up
with. But you get those ‘before and after’ pictures, post them with the
mumbo-jumbo and the hashtags, and people want to know what you’re
doing.”
MLM enrollment strategy requires secrecy up front, so they enforce
strict rules about what their “coaches” (recruits) are allowed to reveal to
outsiders. Becca never posted Optavia’s name on Facebook, because the
company explicitly forbids it. Instead, she was provided scripts to post
verbatim that made the program sound like this exclusive mystery, all to
keep people from searching it and finding what a Scientologist would call
“black PR.”
Back in the ’70s, the Moonies referred to their guileful recruiting and
fund-raising tactics with the genteelism “heavenly deception.” Similarly,
MLMers sweet-talk their friends and family into deceiving others along
with them. At Mary Kay, a policy euphemistically termed the “Husband
Unawareness Plan” encourages wives to get involved without their
husbands’ “permission” and then teaches them how to keep their costs a
secret. One Mary Kay Executive Senior Cadillac Sales Director laid out her
version of the Husband Unawareness Plan in an instruction manual for her
consultants: “If you do wish to shop for things today I want you to know
that I accept CASH, Check, VISA, Mastercard, Discover, American
Express. I also do interest free payment plans and the husband unawareness
program or otherwise known as very creative financing; a little cash, a little
on a check and a little on a card. No one will know the total.”
Becca was told to withhold all specifics until she got a potential
downline on the phone. That’s when she’d conduct her “health intake”—a
twenty-point survey featuring intimate questions like: “If you could not fail,
how much weight would you like to lose? When was the last time you were
there? What has changed between now and then? Do you remember what
that felt like? What would it be like if you were there again? Are there any
family members you also want to help? Thank you so much for telling
me . . . I really believe I have something that can help you reach your health
goals; I’m so excited to share it with you.”
These intakes weren’t medical examinations conducted by registered
dietitians. They were trauma-bonding tactics carried out by regular people,
like Becca and her mother-in-law. The company knows what it’s doing by
bestowing recruits with titles like coach, senior coach, Presidential Director,
and Global Health Ambassador—it fills them with a sense of authority. “I
think a lot of these women convince themselves that they really are a health
coach,” Becca asserted. “They say you are giving people an amazing gift of
life. If your coach gives you a shout-out in our secret Facebook group,
people are like, ‘Incredible job! Saving lives!’” Everyone knows deep down
that the difference between a coach and a senior coach has nothing to do
with nutrition expertise; it’s how many people they were able to add to their
downline that month. Yet when the company is love-bombing you with a
fancy title and adulating you as a lifesaver, you become conditioned to
interpret it that way, if you want to.
Nothing gets Optavia’s coaches hyped like its annual leadership retreats
and conventions. Recruits save up all year to attend these events, skipping
best friends’ weddings and grandchildren’s births if they must, for the
chance to meet Optavia’s charismatic leader and cofounder, Dr. Wayne
Andersen. “They called him Dr. A and he’s, like, their ruler,” Becca winced,
referencing the anesthesiologist turned self-described “leader of the
movement to better health.” “Dr. A comes out and spits culty inspiration
about how we are saving people’s lives one person at a time, how we are
making America healthy. Of course they charge a fortune for tickets to see
him.”
All MLMs throw similar Tony Robbins–esque self-help bashes, which
cost thousands of dollars to attend. Tupperware hosts an annual Jubilee.
Mary Kay’s Career Conferences are known for their masterfully
orchestrated recognition ceremonies. Recruits don’t just go for fun; these
conventions are advertised as compulsory if a recruit really wants to
“succeed.” Though rest assured the point isn’t to provide serviceable selling
advice. It’s to paint the most extravagantly flattering portrait of the
company possible, to lure already-committed recruits deeper in. The
average Amway event reads like a cross between a Christian tent revival, a
political rally, a football game, and a supersized family reunion. Some
Amway conferences are literally called family reunions.
More than any other MLM family, Amway wields unbelievable power
—not just over people directly involved with the company, but over the
entire American political system. Founded in 1959, Amway operates in a
hundred countries and rakes in $9 billion a year, thanks to its network of
four million distributors, called International Business Owners (IBOs).
Amway is a Christian company whose fundamental message is that
Americans have lost touch with the qualities that once made us great:
individual freedom to achieve, traditional “American family values,” and
unswerving devotion to God’s blessed America.* “I’m going to tell you
what’s wrong with this country,” bellowed Dave Severn, one of the
company’s unicorn-rare Executive Diamonds, at a 1991 rally. (Amway’s top
titles are all named after precious gems and other treasures: Ruby, Pearl,
Emerald, Diamond, Double Diamond, Triple Diamond, Crown, Crown
Ambassador.) “They have allowed everything we stand for . . . to simply go
down the tubes by hiring UN-CHRISTIAN PEOPLE to try and run a
Christian-based society. . . . The Amway business is built on God’s laws.”
Amway’s two deeply conservative founders were Jay Van Andel and
Rich DeVos, who died in 2004 and 2018, respectively. That second name
should sound familiar: The DeVoses are a Michigan-based family of
politically influential billionaires; Rich was the father-in-law of Donald
Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy. With a personal net worth of over $5
billion, Rich DeVos served as the finance chair of the Republican National
Committee, was BFFs with Gerald Ford, secured special Amway tax breaks
for hundreds of millions of dollars, and funneled prodigious sums into
Republican presidential candidates’ coffers. Amway funded the campaigns
of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, and, naturally, the most direct-
sales-friendly president of all time, Donald Trump. Throughout the 2010s,
Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs. These
included a vitamin company and a seminar company, both of which paid
him seven figures for permission to use his likeness as a mascot and to
rebrand as the Trump Network and Trump Institute. (In 2019, a federal
judge ruled that Trump and his three children could be sued for fraud in
connection with these organizations.) To return DeVos’s favors, these
presidents all publicly lauded Amway and the Direct Selling Association in
general as a commendable, profoundly patriotic enterprise.*
Rich DeVos’s seventeenth-century interpretation of prosperity theology
suggests that if you are not rich, then God does not love you. As he
declared, “The free-enterprise system . . . is a gift of God to us, and we
should understand it, embrace it, and believe in it.” According to DeVos, if
you feel as though you’ve been shut out of the system your whole life, then
you’d be an imbecile not to give up on bureaucracy and turn to an MLM.
This is the rhetoric that permeates Amway’s legendary rallies, where the
run of show might go something like this: Delivered with the anthemic
cadence of a Pentecostal preacher, an emcee kicks off with some anecdote
about one or two of Amway’s most successful IBOs. Then they introduce
the featured speaker. Soundtracked by the Rocky theme song, the orator
emerges while attendees go berserk. The speaker—typically a white, male,
gem-level IBO pocketing tens of thousands of dollars for the appearance—
narrates his emotional success story while clicking through a PowerPoint of
the homes, yachts, cars, and vacations he’s acquired thanks to Amway.
Shouts of “Ain’t it great?” and “I believe!” echo throughout the venue.
Diamonds and Pearls call out “How sweet it is!” An award presentation
follows, and in closing, the audience joins in a tearful performance of “God
Bless America.” At the end, uplines look their downlines in the eye and
literally say, “I love you.”
It doesn’t take a sociologist to see how deceptive it is to drop the “love”
bomb on one’s business subordinates—especially knowing they will never
make a dime from the relationship, much less buy a yacht. Most recruits
don’t even want a yacht. They’d have no use for a yacht. Again, the reason
they struck up with the company in the first place and then attended this
overblown conference was because they’re a stay-at-home mom or an
immigrant attempting to build a decent life.
Say you’re an MLMer who’s been in business for a while, even attended
a conference or two, and have finally started feeling like you want to get
out. Mention these inklings to anyone inside, and you can expect your
upline to spam your inbox with messages guilt-tripping and gaslighting you
into staying. Becca was fortunate that her mother-in-law was a fairly chill
upline, so when she decided to quit while she was ahead, a year into
Optavia, she only had a handful of calls to ignore. But for other MLMers,
the exit cost feels enormous. While there probably won’t be Scientology-
esque threats of alien body-snatching, you very well might experience
agonizing guilt and anxiety that you’re giving up on your dreams and losing
a surrogate family. One former Amway IBO lamented how terrible it felt to
have people who once told her they loved her suddenly ghost her with no
remorse: “Right at the beginning you’re confronted with love . . . [and]
attention by Amwayians. You get the impression that people are really
interested in you as a person. That’s simply not true. It is only a means to
bind you to the group.”
iv.
Hey babe, I saw your message in the group Facebook chat. I know you’re thinking
about leaving. You’re feeling frustrated and uninspired. I get it. BELIEVE ME. But the
most successful people in this business are the ones who push through. Think of this
as a test. Will you prove yourself to be a total boss babe and turn things around, or will
you give up? Think of how much time and work you’ve already put in! Do you really
want to throw it all away? Think of all the money you’ll make if you keep going a couple
months more. Think of those medical bills, think of your kids. Don’t be SELFISH. Be
STRONG!! You know we’re all family here, so please: help ME help YOU. Let’s hop on
a call to talk this through before you do something you’ll regret, okay? xoxo
* * *
There’s another portion of the answer to what makes MLM language
sound scammy and cringe to some people but inviting and believable to
others. Whether we associate statements like “Do you want to swim in
cash?” and “You could be a millionaire within a year!” with fraud has to do
not with the words themselves (which, all on their own and without any
context, do sound enticing). Instead, it has to do with the different ways
humans have evolved to process information. It has to do with the social
science of gullibility.
According to Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman,
gullibility exists because of two opposing data-processing systems that have
developed in humans’ brains: System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1
thinking is quick, intuitive, and automatic. When someone tells us
something, this system relies on personal experience and anecdotal
knowledge to make a snap judgment. Among ancient humans who lived in
small groups, where trust was built on lifelong face-to-face relationships,
this method was pretty much all you needed. Back then, you didn’t have to
be too skeptical when someone told you something, because that someone
was probably your mom or cousin or another person you’d known forever.
Nowadays, whenever we have a heuristic response to some piece of news,
causing us to make an instant decision about it, that’s System 1 thinking.
Then we have System 2, which involves slower, more deliberative,
rational judgment. This is a much newer development. In the “information
age,” where billions of people interact with each other anonymously online,
spreading questionable claims and deleterious conspiracy theories,
System 2 thinking becomes useful, because when something sounds fishy,
we don’t have to lean on instinct to make decisions about it. We can take
our time, ask questions, thoroughly investigate, and then decide how we
want to react. Unfortunately, because this process is so much newer than
System 1, it doesn’t always work. In part, we have those deeply embedded
human-reasoning flaws, like confirmation bias and hazy cognitive labor
divisions, to thank for our System 2 dysfunction. Long story short, human
beings are evolving to be able to handle lots of information about lots of
different things; but we’re not AI robots, and we’re not doing it perfectly.
In contemporary life, when an MLM is pitched with all the bombastic
fixings, many people have a gut reaction. They don’t need to write out a
pros-and-cons list or think about it critically (after all, the pitch likely came
from someone they know and can judge easily). They’re able to tell right
away that either A) this indeed sounds like a great opportunity, or B) this
thing is trash and not for them. That’s System 1 at work. But other people
find themselves needing more time and careful thought. Luckily, we have
System 2.
The economist Stacie Bosley once did an experiment to demonstrate
how Systems 1 and 2 pan out in pyramid scheme recruitment. She set up
shop at a state fair and handed willing passersby $5 in cash, telling them
they could either keep the money or try her “Airplane Game” (which is like
a condensed version of a pyramid scheme). Some people took one look at
the offer and said, “No way, lady. I’m keeping my five bucks. That’s a
scam.” Other people took time to process it, looked at all the rules,
assessed, and finally told her, “No, this is a bad deal.” They came to the
same conclusion, but via System 2 instead of System 1. Then there were
people who deliberated carefully, but lacked the tools to do that well—the
cognition, the literacy—so they decided to play the Airplane Game after all.
And then there were those who just impulsively played the game and got
screwed that way. Impulsivity, says Bosley, is a common diagnostic
indicator of people’s vulnerability to fraud.
It’s not totally clear why some people have a System 1 Spidey sense for
pyramid schemes, quack health cures, and other too-good-to-be-true
messaging while others don’t. Some researchers say it might be related to
differences in trust that stem from early childhood—the theory being that
when you develop trust as a little kid, it sets a lifelong expectation that the
world will be honest and nice to you. All sorts of childhood exposures
could cause a person to become more or less trusting. Some people, like my
dad, might have had their trust damaged by an absent parent, or another
kind of trauma. Certainly, when you add factors like stress and financial
hardship, some people choose to ignore their skeptical instincts and find
themselves neck-deep in a shakedown anyway. As much as I’d like to take
full intellectual credit for my exquisitely sensitive scam nose, I know that
my disdain for pyramid schemes likely correlates to the fact that I am
privileged enough to have no urgent need for their promises.
Sociologists also say that higher education and training in the scientific
method generally make people less gullible. And for better or for worse, so
does being in a bad mood. In several experiments, researchers found that
when someone is in a good mood, they become more innocent and
unsuspecting, while feeling grumpy makes one better at sensing deception.
Which has to be the most curmudgeonly superpower I’ve ever heard.
v.
My favorite line I’ve heard MLMers use to defend their business is
“This isn’t a pyramid scheme. Corporate jobs are the REAL pyramid
scheme.” It’s both a nonsense thought-terminating cliché and a flashing
neon sign of us-versus-them conditioning. But while MLMs talk a lot of
smack about corporate America and corporate America thinks of MLMs as
a scammy joke, they are ultimately both derived from the same Protestant
capitalist history. And the toxically positive fable that our society is a true
meritocracy—that you can climb the ladder from the bottom to the top if
you just work hard and have faith—imbues the rhetoric of our “normal”
workforce, too.
Many modern companies actively aim to gain a cult following in the
image of companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Ikea—brands that
succeeded in cultivating extreme solidarity and loyalty among both
employees and patrons. To learn more about the language of cultlike
corporations, I hit up a Dutch business scholar and management consultant
named Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries. Having studied workplace leadership
styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical
clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort.
Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans,
singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said.
Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace
gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to
play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-
driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human
capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing
around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same
page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare”
(something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My
old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into
transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset”
to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it
was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why.
Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed
parodying it in my free time.
In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all
forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has
been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have
changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-
in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery:
“bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century,
with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google
ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements
toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct,
self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.”
This jargon isn’t damaging in and of itself. As always, words need
context. And when used in competitive start-up environments, those in
power can easily take advantage of staffers’ eagerness to achieve (and basic
need for employment). Excessive “garbage language” may signal that upper
management is suppressing individuality, putting employees in a headspace
where their entire reality is governed by the company’s rules, which likely
weren’t created with much compassion or fairness in mind. (Research
consistently shows that something like one in five CEOs has psychopathic
tendencies.) “All companies have special terms, and sometimes they make
sense, but sometimes they’re nonsense,” said Kets de Vries. “As a
consultant, sometimes I enter an organization where people use code names
and acronyms, but they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.
They’re just imitating what top management says.”
At Amazon, for instance, Jeff Bezos’s ideals are strikingly similar to
those of MLM leaders: disdain for bureaucracy, fixation on hierarchies,
incentives to rise to the top no matter who gets thrown under the bus, and a
juxtaposition of lofty motivational-speak with metaphors of defeat. Bezos
created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership
Principles. It’s a code for how Amazonians should think, behave, and speak.
There are fourteen of these principles—all vague platitudes, like “think
big,” “dive deep,” “have backbone,” and “deliver results.” Employees recite
them like mantras. According to an explosive 2015 New York Times
Amazon exposé, these rules are part of the company’s “daily language . . .
used in hiring, cited at meetings, and quoted in food-truck lines at
lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.”
After an Amazon employee is hired, they are assigned to commit all 511
words of the Leadership Principles to memory. They are quizzed a few days
later, and those who recite the principles perfectly receive a symbolic
award: permission to proclaim “I’m Peculiar,” Amazon’s catchphrase for
those who admirably push workplace boundaries. From then on, employees
are expected to tear each other’s ideas apart in meetings (similar to the
vicious confrontations of the Synanon Game), “even when doing so is
uncomfortable or exhausting” (that’s according to Leadership Principle
#13). If an underling gives an opinion or responds to a question in a way
their manager doesn’t like, they can expect to be called stupid or interrupted
midsentence and told to stop speaking. According to ex-Amazonians,
maxims often repeated around the office include: “When you hit the wall,
climb the wall” and “Work comes first, life comes second, and trying to
find the balance comes last.” As Bezos himself wrote in a 1999 shareholder
letter, “I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every
morning terrified.”
Though petrifying your staff into obedience might help a company meet
its goals faster in the short term, Kets de Vries says that rigidity stifles
innovation, which in the long term is bad for both the business and its
employees. (And that’s to say nothing of ethics or empathy.) During his
management consultations, Kets de Vries advises senior execs to ask
themselves: Does the company foster individuality and nonconformism to
drive breakthroughs? Does it encourage employees to have a life and
language of their own? Or does everyone speak in the exact same tone
using the exact same verbiage, which sounds suspiciously like that of the
person in charge? “Being in a top management position, if you’re not
careful, you go into an echo chamber,” Kets de Vries explained. “People are
going to tell you what you want to hear, so you start to get away with your
madness. And that madness becomes institutionalized very quickly.”
I interviewed a former employee of a “sustainable fashion” start-up,
initially about her involvement with The Class by Taryn Toomey (a “cult
fitness” studio we’ll discuss a bit in part 5), and she told me the only reason
she got involved with the workout “cult” in the first place was in response
to finally quitting her hellish job. For the three years she worked at the
fashion company, its physically stunning, psychologically sadistic leader
prevented her from sleeping, earning a living wage, or maintaining outside
relationships. Eventually the role sent her into a self-described nervous
breakdown, and she left to do some soul-searching—that’s when she found
The Class, which wound up being a wholly positive experience for her.
“The workout group is nothing like my old job, which took over my entire
existence,” she told me. “My boss expected us to treat her company as our
religion. It actually kind of ruined my life for a while.”
Millions of Americans have worked for a cultlike company at some
point, and some of us have even suffered through an atmosphere as
tyrannous as Amazon’s. On the illusive ladder of American capitalism, it’s
just a few rungs up from a corporation that pays you not in money, but in
lies . . . the star-spangled MLM.
vi.
I said before that an MLM is just a pyramid scheme that hasn’t gotten
caught. So how do you catch one?
To find the answer, let’s look back at the story of how the Federal Trade
Commission (FTC) shut down its very first MLM. In the early 1970s, a
shoddy cosmetics company perplexingly named Holiday Magic (it had
nothing to do with annual festivities) began fielding a stampede of lawsuits.
The business had been founded about a decade earlier by William Penn
Patrick, the single most snake-oil-y gasbag of all the direct sales guys I’ve
come across. Based in Northern California, this dude was a tightass
wannabe Republican senator in his thirties whom the Los Angeles Times
once called the state’s “strangest politician.”
Like most other MLM founders, Patrick was big on prosperity theology
and New Thought, and he was famous for turning inspirational mottoes
minacious: “Tell [recruits] they’re going to be happier, healthier, wealthier,
and receive what they want out of life with the Holiday Magic program,” he
wrote, adding in the same pen stroke, “Any person who fails in the Holiday
Magic program must fall into one of the following categories: lazy, stupid,
greedy, or dead.” Patrick was also known for throwing the uttermost bizarre
MLM conference in history. Called Leadership Dynamics, it took place in a
crappy Bay Area motel and cost a thousand bucks to attend. For two days
straight, Patrick had recruits engage in a series of freaky power games: He
made them climb inside coffins and strung them up on gigantic wooden
crosses, where they’d dangle all afternoon. Like Jim Jones, Chuck Dietrich,
and (to a lesser degree) Jeff Bezos, he also forced them into “group
therapy” sessions where they verbally tormented each other for hours on
end.
Patrick’s behavior was unhinged from all angles, but when the FTC
brought him to court, their most compelling argument against him, and
what eventually allowed them to shut down Holiday Magic, was their
points about his speech. Ultimately, the court ruled that Patrick’s deceptive
hyperbole, loaded buzzwords, and gaslighting disguised as inspiration were
what defined him as a pyramid schemer. This makes sense, because in
every corner of life, business and otherwise, when you can tell deep down
that something is ethically wrong but are having trouble pinpointing why,
language is a good place to look for evidence. This is where the FTC turned
to squash Holiday Magic, and over the next few years, its attorneys cited
the same type of outlandish, fraudulent messaging as they prosecuted a
litany of MLMs—including the biggest one they ever went after, Amway.
In 1979, the FTC finally accused Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos of
pyramid scheme activity, which led to a massive drawn-out case. But, as we
know, Amway never closed up shop. (Again, this was a company whose
founders golfed with heads of state—there was no chance the government
was going to take them down.) The judge fined the company $100,000
(chump change for the corporate heavyweight) and sent them on their merry
way.
Ultimately, the FTC losing its case against Amway offered the whole
direct sales industry a measure of protection from there on out. Since 1979,
the FTC has only canned a handful of MLMs, and never any of the giants.
Now, every time an MLM comes under fire, they can say, “No, no, no, you
have us all wrong. We’re not a pyramid scheme. We’re not a cult. We’re
just like Amway. We’re a meritocracy. We’re the chance to be an
entrepreneur, a business owner, a #bossbabe. We’re not a scam—we’re the
American Dream.”
And as far as the courts are concerned, these sentiments are just true
enough to believe there’s nothing cultish about them at all.
* * *
Hey girl. I hate that I have to do this. But I just got word from the top, and unfortunately
we’re going to have to let you go. When you first joined my team, I was so excited
about your potential. But despite all the time and effort we put into growing you, it
doesn’t seem like you really wanted it. Some people aren’t the right fit for this
opportunity, and trust me, as your upline, that’s harder for me than it is for you. I’m
going to have to remove you from the Facebook group and deactivate your account. I
guess you weren’t a boss babe after all. x
i.
I’m vigorously power marching in place, like a toy soldier. It feels
dopey, and I want to half-ass it, but I told myself I’d either do this with
everything I’ve got or not at all. Rolling my forearms and fists in front of
me with as much gusto as my muscles will allow, I’m squeezing my eyes
shut while repeating the phrase “I am powerful beyond measure.”
My parents are on either side of me, staggered slightly so there’s enough
room, performing the same move and joining me in the affirmation: “I am
powerful beyond measure.” “Embody it, awaken it!” cries our glowing
leader, Patricia Moreno, projecting equal parts tenderness and ferocity. She
calls this move WILLPOWER.
A few eight-counts later, we’re punching the air in front of us, twisting
our torsos with each hook. This move is called STRONG. “It’s the reminder
to stop talking about what you can’t do, and call up your strength,” Moreno
narrates. “YOU decide that TODAY you are strong enough to make any
change you want to make. Say, ‘I am stronger than I seem.’” Still punching
and twisting, we repeat: “I am stronger than I seem.” “Beautiful! Feel like a
warrior!” croons Moreno.
Two more movements complete our four-step routine: The next one is
called BRAVE. Jumping up on one foot, kicking the opposite leg back
behind us, we curl our hands into clenched spheres and rocket-launch them
into the sky, one at a time. “Whenever you’re stressed, just do that move,
and it’ll help interrupt worries, and doubts, and fears!” impels Moreno.
“And then you change your language and you say, ‘I am braver than I
think!’” My parents and I echo the line, exploding our bodies into the air: “I
am braver than I think!”
Last move: ABUNDANCE. We touch our palms to our hearts, zestfully
shoot them open in a wide V above our heads, touch our hearts again, then
extend our arms down by our hips to mirror the previous posture.
Meanwhile, we repeat: “I am blessed with all I need.” “Gratitude is the
attitude that will CHANGE. YOUR. LIFE!” roars Moreno. “You have to
think about, talk about, focus on the blessings you already have.” Now
we’re breaking into a jumping jack, arms wide at the top and a deep toe
touch at the bottom, shouting, “I am blessed with all I need!”
“Let’s do them all!” invites Moreno, and we repeat the four movements
in a row: WILLPOWER, STRONG, BRAVE, ABUNDANCE.
And then, out of nowhere, tears. I’m no more than five minutes into
Moreno’s movement affirmations when my voice breaks into a warble. My
mom turns and smiles uncomfortably. “Amanda, are you . . . crying?” I hear
her attempt not to sound judgmental. My parents haven’t seen me cry in two
years. “Everyone said this would happen!” I shriek in self-defense, at once
laughing and blubbering, betrayed by this liquidy reflex.
With that, the spell is broken. “All right, that’s enough,” my dad
grumbles, shaking off the routine like a costume he just noticed was
ridiculous. “I’m going to the garage to get on the Lifecycle. I exercise BY
MYSELF!”
“We know, Craig. Take the recycling with you,” my mother retorts, still
marching in place, rolling her hands.
It’s high jinks here at the Montell household: My science professor
parents and I, the most cynical trio ever to shout the phrase “I’m blessed
with all I need” mid–jumping jack, are taking a free online intenSati class.
This media-proclaimed cult-favorite workout was created in the early 2000s
by former aerobics champion and today’s virtual instructor, fifty-five-year-
old Patricia Moreno, whose shiny black ponytail and radiant grin are
broadcasting from an iPad in my parents’ sunroom. Baptized by
Cosmopolitan.com as “a super fit Mexican Oprah” meets a “jock version of
J.Lo,” Moreno makes athletics and enlightenment seem like an effortless
combo. Her high-energy technique pairs elements of dance, kickboxing, and
yoga with spoken affirmations, so each move has a mantra that goes with it.
In the lingo of intenSati, these move-affirmation pairings are called
“incantations”—a concept Moreno learned at a Tony Robbins conference at
the turn of the millennium. intenSati (a play on “intensity”) is a
portmanteau of “intention” and “sati,” the Pali word for “mindfulness.” It
could definitely be classified as “woo-woo.”
At fifty-eight and sixty-four, my mom and dad are in fantastic shape,
way better than I am, thanks to all the biking and swimming they do in
Santa Barbara, where they moved from Baltimore seven years ago. They’re
not “group workout people,” they love to remind me, but while I’m visiting
for the weekend, I’ve convinced them to try out one of the cult fitness
classes I’ve been researching for this book. “I know all about at-home
workouts.” My mother beams, gathering her hair into a neat bun. “I signed
up for Peloton, you know.”
intenSati was recommended to me by Natalia Petrzela, a student turned
instructor who started following Moreno (both physically and ideologically)
in 2005. I was inclined to listen to Natalia, who seemed more down-to-earth
than the “cult workout” stereotype I’m used to seeing in Los Angeles: the
Equinox-subscribed wellness crusader who goes to SoulCycle three times a
week and CorePower Yoga the other four days, lives in Lululemon
leggings, and hasn’t ingested a simple carbohydrate since season twelve of
The Bachelor. Natalia is a fitness historian at the New School in New York
City with a PhD from Stanford, who relatably identifies as “not athletic”
and “alienated by sports.” She promised that if I, a feminist killjoy who’s
intimidated by exercise, were going to fall in love with any cult workout,
she’s pretty sure intenSati would be the one. “I was just as skeptical of this
culty workout stuff as you,” Natalia swears. “I remember intenSati was first
described to me as ‘using voices and visualizations to transform your body
and your outlook,’ and I was like, ‘Hell no, this is so woo-woo.’”
“All right, all right,” I respond. “I’ll give it a whirl.”
The marriage of mystical self-help messaging with a hard-core exercise
class might not seem remarkable now, but when Natalia found intenSati in
the mid-aughts, the two concepts had only just become acquainted. Moreno
didn’t know it when she created the workout in 2002, but its launch was
perfectly timed: At the turn of the twenty-first century, boutique fitness was
just beginning to erupt as a major industry. In the 1980s and ’90s, most
Americans got their exercise in big-box gyms or community centers like the
YMCA; small, pricier workout classes with charismatic instructors, strong
branding, and transcendent benefits were not yet the norm.
As recently as the 1950s, the medical community didn’t even
universally recommend exercise for women (much less that they sweat their
asses off while shouting empowering things about themselves in public
multiple times a week). In the 1920s and ’30s, one of the only successful
American fitness salons was a chain called Slenderella, whose philosophy
was entirely built on slimming women’s bodies daintily, without sweat, and
purely for cosmetic purposes. Classes offered rhythmics (light stretching
and dance), promising to trim female clients “in all the right places” minus
the “toil and suffering” of real exertion, which was ruled to be
contemptuously unfeminine, leading to big “manly” muscles and
reproductive risks. American women instead developed a fixation with
“reducing” (and ever since, weight loss has remained a dismal “cult” of its
own).
It wasn’t until the late 1960s when everyday Americans fully came
around to the idea that working out to the point of perspiration was good for
everyone. In 1968, the blockbuster fitness book Aerobics helped convince
the public that exercise was indeed beneficial for both men and women.
Over the following decade or two, women embraced exercise with gusto
and soon figured out what cognitive anthropology studies would later
reveal: that it was more fun to do it in groups. (Endorphins surge even more
powerfully when we exercise together).
In the 1970s and ’80s, with the women’s liberation movement well
under way, the passage of Title IX, and the invention of the sports bra,
women were poised to gather together and get fit. This is right around when
Jazzercise took off (and by 1984, it would become one of the country’s
fastest-growing franchises, second only to Domino’s Pizza). Invented by
professional dancer Judi Sheppard Missett, Jazzercise turned millions of
women on to the concept of community fitness. Celebrity instructors like
Jane Fonda and Raquel Welch, with their signature bright spandex and
sprightly delivery, became some of the first “fitness influencers.”
Big-box gyms and health clubs like 24 Hour Fitness and Crunch took
over the workout market for a while throughout the late ’80s and ’90s—
around the same time yoga found its way to everyday Americans. Of
course, yoga had already existed for millennia; references to the practice
can be found in Indian texts dating back 2,500 years. But for much of
yoga’s history, its only practitioners were religious ascetics. For these
Eastern yogis, there were no acrobatic sun salutations or cranked
thermostats. Yoga was more like meditation, and it was entirely centered on
stillness. (To this day, some monks in India continue to perform feats of
marathon motionlessness, posed without a twitch for days on end.) Almost
all of the West’s popular assumptions about yoga theory come from after
the 1800s. That’s when developments in photography allowed pictures of
yoga poses to make their way overseas. Europeans were transfixed by these
images and merged the Indian postures with their existing notions of
bodybuilding and gymnastics. Yoga historians say much of what modern
Americans recognize as yoga today is partly a result of this mash-up.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, yoga planted the seed that
fitness studios could be more than just places to change your body; they
could also be intimate temples of emotional well-being, even spiritual
enlightenment. But the rituals needed to create that sense of mysticism—
rituals like affirmations, mantras, and chanting, whose roots are in religion
—weren’t yet overlapping with intense exercise. The idea to mix the
physical and the metaphysical was still about as far from people’s minds as
crossing a doughnut with a croissant. Which is to say, it was coming, and it
was going to be huge, but the recipe hadn’t come together quite yet.
But then . . . the twenty-first century happened. Not long after the stroke
of midnight on Y2K, every piece of American fitness history seemed to
fuse and detonate, kicking off the “cult fitness” industry as we know it. In
2000, we got the Bar Method, the studio that catalyzed America’s fixation
with the ballet-inspired fitness craze. The same year we got CrossFit, which
catered to a very different demographic than barre, but whose “boxes” had
an equally boutique-y, anti-gym vibe. (At its peak in early 2020, CrossFit
flaunted over ten thousand boxes, generating $4 billion annually. That was
before many locations disaffiliated with the brand name due to Greg
Glassman outing himself as a shameless racist. More on that in a bit.) With
2001 came Pure Barre, which scaled to over five hundred North American
studios. The following year brought CorePower Yoga, which grew into two
hundred-plus locations. SoulCycle, with its nightclub-esque lighting, loud
music, and zippy instructors, arrived in 2006, just a few months before LA
fitness instructor Tracy Anderson helped Gwyneth Paltrow lose her baby
weight, boosting Hollywood personal trainers to a celebrity station of their
own.
Over the following fifteen years or so, boutique fitness studios
multiplied and spun off of each other, making them a fixture in American
society. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub
Association, the US health and fitness industry was worth over $32 billion
in 2018. Soon, there was a workout class for any interest. Whether you
were into cycling, circuit training, running, yoga, dancing, pole dancing,
boxing, jiujitsu, Pilates on a land-bound mechanical surfboard,* or literally
anything else, you could find a devoted fitness community. In addition to
SoulCycle, CrossFit, and countless barre, Pilates, and yoga shops, we got
Barry’s Bootcamp (high-intensity interval training—aka HIIT—with a
sassy twist), Orangetheory (like Barry’s but more competitive), November
Project (free outdoor boot camps held at six a.m.), The Class by Taryn
Toomey (like boot camp meets yoga . . . with screaming), modelFIT (what
all the models do), Platefit (like modelFIT but on a giant vibrating
apparatus), intenSati (you’re familiar), Rise Nation (the SoulCycle of stair
climbing), LIT Method (the SoulCycle of rowing), LEKFIT (the SoulCycle
of trampolining), Peloton (like SoulCycle via Zoom), and dozens upon
dozens more.
Unlike the YMCAs and Jazzercise classes of the past, these intimate
studios positioned themselves as sacred spaces—as movements—offering a
potent ideological, deeply personal experience. Within these hallowed,
inspirational-quote-bedecked halls, you’ll not only perfect your squat and
decrease your resting heart rate, you’ll also find a personal mentor, meet
your best friends, get over your ex, summon the confidence to ask for a
raise, manifest your soul mate, get sober, get through chemo, and prove to
yourself once and for all that you’re powerful beyond measure and blessed
with all you need.
“SoulCycle talks about how people ‘come for the body but stay for the
breakthrough,’” said Casper ter Kuile, a researcher at Harvard Divinity
School and author of The Power of Ritual. “It’s a good workout, but that’s
only the beginning.” In these classes, fitness devotees find a sense of
release, insight on what’s important to them, and a sanctuary away from the
pressures of their everyday existence. “It is more safe and more powerful
than even church,” a deep-dyed SoulCycler who rides in San Francisco’s
Castro neighborhood told Harvard Divinity School. At SoulCycle, he said,
“I feel like I’m at home.”
It is no accident that the studio fitness industry blew up so suddenly and
powerfully in the early 2010s—a time when adults’ trust in both traditional
religion and the medical establishment took a sharp decline. An unshocking
2018 poll by the Multiple Chronic Conditions Resource Center found that
81 percent of American millennials are unsatisfied with their healthcare
experience, due to everything from high insurance costs to institutional race
and gender bias. Not to mention the US’s lack of public fitness programs
(like, say, Japan’s “radio calisthenics” broadcasts, which folks are free to
follow at home or together in community parks each morning at no cost).
Younger Americans feel like they have no choice but to take their health
into their own hands.
Combine this withdrawal from mainstream medicine with young
people’s disillusionment with traditional faith, and cult fitness exploded to
fill these corporeal and spiritual voids. In a 2015 study called “How We
Gather,” ter Kuile explored the ways millennials find community and
transcendence beyond conventional religious communities, and found that
studio workout classes were among the ten most profound and formative
spaces. At least for a certain demographic . . . because as soon as people
began coveting fitness so intensely, they started to crave more exclusivity,
too.
In high school, I paid $99 a year for my Planet Fitness membership
(which, granted, I almost never used), but ten years later, exercising might
cost up to half that much just for one class. (And that doesn’t count the
designer uniform implicitly required—the $100 Lulus, the $80 rose quartz–
infused glass water bottle, which is a real product I found on Net-A-Porter.)
A home Peloton bike costs $2,000 and the app an additional monthly fee.
Certainly, there are less overtly elitist fitness movements happening all over
the US—some right up the street from the Goop-obsessed Malibu
stereotype: A 2014 ethnography of LA’s El Monte “Zumba Ladies”
documents a tight-knit community of Latina women of all ages and shapes
whose $4 banda-meets-Flashdance-style exercise classes, complete with
kitschy neon Spandex, are nothing short of divinely feminine sanctuaries.
But those aren’t the trendy workout spaces that make Cosmopolitan
headlines.
The audience to which “cult fitness” primarily caters—urban-dwelling
millennials with income to spare—overlaps quite precisely with the
contingency that has renounced traditional religion. For this population,
“wellness” start-ups and influencers started doing the work of spiritual and
community leaders. It’s always chancy to put such trust in the hands of
someone whose bottom line is their own brand, but for consumers who felt
like they had nowhere else to turn, the risk seemed worth it.
Starting in the 2010s, America’s fastest-growing companies in general
became the ones that offered not only desirable products and services, but
also personal transformation, belonging, and answers to big life questions
like: Who am I in this increasingly isolated world? How do I connect with
people around me? How do I find my most authentic self and take the steps
to become that person? In so many pockets of American culture, folks turn
to workout studios for these answers. “Meaning-making is a growth
industry,” said ter Kuile. Like church, fitness brands became both a social
identity and a code by which to lead your life. The fitness “movement”
encompasses customs and rituals, social expectations, and consequences for
failing to show up. People meet their closest friends and spouses in the
studio; true diehards quit their jobs to become instructors themselves. “I
don’t want to ride. I don’t ever want to ride. A good-hair day is a good-
enough excuse for me not to ride. Now I’m riding five or six times a week
because we have built such a supportive community,” effused one devout
Peloton user in a 2019 New York magazine interview. “It goes so beyond the
bike.”
Workout studios wound up feeling, to some degree, holy. After all, they
became some of the only physical spaces where the young and religiously
ambivalent could put down their devices and find in-the-flesh community
and connection. “We’re living in dark times,” remarked Sam Rypinski,
owner of a “radically inclusive” Los Angeles gym called Everybody.
“We’re very segregated and separated. . . . We’re cut off by technology. We
don’t connect with our bodies . . . [or] each other. So if there’s a space that
encourages that on any level, people are so happy to be there.”
On top of cerebral notions of “meaning-making” and existential
loneliness add the rise of social media fitness influencers (and the so-called
aspirational body standards they promote), plus innovations in workout
technology (high-performance athleticwear, fitness trackers, streaming
classes), and it’s no wonder the business of exercise boomed in a godlike
way.
At some point during the mid-2010s, the phrase “cult workout” entered
our vocabularies—a succinct label to describe the fitness industry’s
intensified societal role. Participants in Casper ter Kuile’s Harvard Divinity
School study sincerely told him things like “SoulCycle is like my cult,” and
they meant it in a good way. The cult comparisons were something brands
didn’t know how to handle at first. In 2015, I interviewed SoulCycle’s
senior vice president of “Brand Strategy and PR” about the company’s
status as a cult workout. Cautiously, she told me, “We don’t use that word.
We say ‘community.’” It was very clear that she didn’t want to leave people
any room to conflate her employer with the likes of Scientology.
But over the years, fitness studios have really leaned into the churchly
role they play in members’ lives. SoulCycle’s website explicitly reads:
“SoulCycle is more than just a workout. It’s a sanctuary.” Publicly crying,
eulogizing lost loved ones, confessing wrongdoings, and testifying to how
the group changed one’s life are customs regularly found and embraced
within studio walls. “I want the next breath to be an exorcism,” is among
the supernatural catchphrases SoulCycle instructors preach in class.
A few years ago, I spoke with Taylor and Justin Norris, the founders of
LIT Method, an up-and-coming indoor rowing brand. The peppy husband-
and-wife duo cut the ribbon on their West Hollywood studio in 2014,
aiming to replicate SoulCycle’s success. (They’re still working on it.) When
I asked how they felt about the association between their business and the
word “cult,” they said, in unison, “We love it.” “They call us the Bolt Cult
on Instagram because our logo is a lightning bolt.” Taylor beamed, flashing
a telegenic grin. “I know there’s a negative connotation to ‘cult,’ but we see
it in a very positive way.”
ii.
When I first began investigating workout cults, it was their
aggressively worshipful language—the chanting and screaming, the woo-
woo jargon and pump-up monologues—that triggered my System 1
impulses. A cult is like porn: You know it when you hear it. SoulCycle’s
theatrically uplifting maxims (“You can climb this mountain! You’re a
boss!” “Change your body, change your mind, change your life!”) seemed
like the bogus waffling of a self-help blowhard. Like something out of
Midsommar, The Class by Taryn Toomey is known for encouraging
students to scream at the top of their lungs as they perform burpees and pike
push-ups and instructors coo New Age–y encouragement: “Notice how
you’re feeling,” “Release what’s stagnant and ignite a new fire.” intenSati’s
blend of zingy rhyming affirmations with metaphysical yoga vocabulary
sounds like occultists casting spells.
To folks with low cringe thresholds who have a hard time suspending
their disbelief (the Montells, for example), the fanatical chanting and
cheering trigger tableaus of religious extremism and pyramid scheme
rallies. To outsiders, just knowing their friends and family are capable of
conforming to such behaviors can feel unsettling.
Across the board, “cult workout language” tends to be ritualistic and
rarefied because it’s good for business. The loaded mantras and monologues
are designed to create an experience so stirring that people can’t resist
coming back and spreading the word. Certainly, exercise brands have
always capitalized on peer pressure to generate return customers—group
weigh-ins, fitness trackers. When my parents got Apple Watches, I beheld
them ruthlessly vie for the highest number of steps every day for a summer.
But competition alone, research suggests, is not enough to keep folks
committed. Exercisers driven only by numbers tend to quit within twelve
months. It’s when elements of belonging, self-worth, and empowerment
enter the picture that members are moved to renew their fitness
memberships year after year. Language is the glue that binds that
“addictive” combo of community and motivation.
With this in mind, it’s important not to overdramatize; and as a whole,
woo-woo workout mantras are very different from the deceptive, reality-
warping dogma of leaders like Marshall Applewhite or Rich DeVos. I can
safely say that most “cult fitness” rhetoric I came across wasn’t
camouflaging evil motives, and importantly, there tended to be boundaries
separating it from the rest of members’ lives. By and large, it obeyed the
rules of ritual time. At the end of a “cult workout” class, you’re allowed to
clock out and start talking like yourself again. And most people do, because
when participants engage with the language of “cult fitness,” it’s usually
with open eyes. Unlike in Amway or Heaven’s Gate, most followers know
they’re participating in a fantasy—that they’re not really “entrepreneurs” or
“in craft” (or “champions” and “warriors,” as it were). Whether instructors
are using the language of ancient monks, motivational speakers, Olympic
coaches, the army, or some mishmash, it’s all a means of creating an
illusion. The words and intonation put exercisers in a transcendent
headspace, but just for the length of a class. If it gets to be too much,
followers are free to tap out at any time without life-ruining exit costs. To
go back to the kink analogy, fitness studios have their followers’ consent.
At least they’re supposed to.
However, as we’ve learned, wherever there are magnetic leaders
charging money for meaning, there’s the chance for things to go awry.
There’s a reason cult fitness language feels so otherworldly—it’s to make
these classes feel essential not only to followers’ health but to their lives as
a whole. Just as much as it’s there to provide the follower a stimulating
experience, it’s to psychologically attach them to the instructor, as if this
fitness class, this guru, holds the ultimate answers to their happiness. When
language blurs the lines separating fitness teacher, celebrity, therapist,
spiritual leader, sex symbol, and friend, it starts to mess with ritual time.
When that happens, the power instructors wield can tread into exploitative
territory. And of course, no fitness company thinks, “You know what,
maybe our brand is becoming too influential. Maybe we should cool it on
the chanting.” After all, they’re actively trying to gain a “cult following.”
It’s the whole point. Brands know that language is the key to accomplishing
this—and they don’t hold back.
Like the studio’s own version of the Ten Commandments, SoulCycle’s
studio walls are emblazoned with mantras that envelop riders into a unified
“we.” “We aspire to inspire,” reads the two-foot-tall print. “We inhale
intention and exhale expectation. . . . The rhythm pushes us harder than we
ever thought possible. Our own strength surprises us every time. Addicted,
obsessed, unnaturally attached to our bikes.” All you’re objectively doing is
riding a stationary bicycle in a big loud room that smells good, but when the
narrative surrounding you—literally written on the walls—is one of tapping
into a strength you didn’t know you had, alongside other people who are
just as “addicted, obsessed,” you feel like you’re a part of something more.
Add a blast of mood-boosting endorphins to the mix, and you find yourself
in a state of uncanny euphoria that you’ll want to spread like a missionary
to all your friends and coworkers.
“I’m an educated, skeptical person, but it just feels so fucking good to
let go of all of that for forty-five minutes in a dark room where no one can
see you cry because someone told you you’re worthy,” said Chani, a friend
of mine from college, in defense of her SoulCycle obsession. Chani does
not identify as “religious”; in fact, when I asked, she scoffed at the
insinuation. “SoulCycle is just a place where you can escape being what
you have to be as a discerning, self-possessed woman trying to succeed,”
she qualified. “You can just give yourself over to the culty lady telling you
what to do. It’s like womb regression in there. You get to be like, ‘I’m a tiny
scared baby,’ and then you come out and you’re like, ‘Yeah I bought
hundred-and-twenty-dollar Lululemons, and fuck you.’”
To be fair, like sexual nerdiness, the grunting and chanting can seem
freaky to outsiders in part for the same reason they feel so damn good to
insiders: It’s that aspect of surrender, of letting down your guard as a poised
individual in order to enmesh yourself in the vulnerable, amorphous, feel-
good blob of the experience. Naturally, that’s going to look weird to
someone just peering in. (“No one looks ‘cool’ at SoulCycle,” Chani
laughed.) And even with the potential to go wrong, the language of “cult
fitness” can be incredibly healing.
Changing the language of the fitness industry from talk of patriarchal
body hatred to talk of goddesslike power was the whole reason Patricia
Moreno founded intenSati in the first place. In the late 1990s, group fitness
class rhetoric was largely about working off the sins of the food you’d
consumed, about sculpting your tummy and thighs to conform to some
normative vision of a “bikini body.” After a lifelong personal struggle with
eating disorders and diet drug misuse, Moreno was driven to alter this
damning narrative. She decided she was going to take her athletic expertise
and combine it with positive affirmations so her students could become
“spiritually fit as well as physically fit.”
Moreno created a new vocabulary of sixty metaphorical names for
workout moves, so instead of saying “punch,” or “squat,” or “lunge,” the
movements would be called “strong,” and “gratitude,” and “commitment.”
Each month, she’d choose a theme for her classes and come up with
incantations to reflect it. She took inspiration from yoga’s dharma talk and
began each class with a story about a personal struggle from her life. “So if
we were talking about strength that month, I’d tell a story about a time I had
to be strong, like through my miscarriage,” she explained to me in an
interview. “Then the incantations would say, ‘I can do hard things. I am
better than before. I am born to drive. I’m glad I’m alive!’” She spits a
sequence of rhyming mantras like spoken word poetry.
At first, Moreno’s students rolled their eyes at the idea of
“incantations.” The tough-as-nails Manhattanites weren’t interested in a talk
therapy session; they wanted their asses kicked. Wasn’t getting shouted at
about their muffin tops the only way to achieve that? Natalia was one of
those world-weary New York trainees—that is, until a few weeks in, when
she found herself earnestly shouting “My body is my temple. I am the
keeper of my health. I am love in action. All is well” at every intenSati class
she could make time for. By then, she was a convert.
SoulCycle, too, concocts specific movement-language pairings to
metaphorically catapult riders toward their dreams. Every SoulCycle
“journey” follows a similar course, its climax falling on a strenuous “hills”
odyssey narrated by a hair-raising sermon. Riders turn up their bikes’
resistance and climb with all their might to the symbolic finish line as their
instructor douses them in verbal inspiration. SoulCycle instructors are
trained to wait for these moments, when students are so physically beat that
they’ll be more receptive to kernels of spirituality, to deliver their best lines.
One SoulCycle star known far and wide for her “hills” monologues was
Los Angeles-based Angela Manuel-Davis, Beyoncé and Oprah’s Spin
instructor of choice. A proud evangelical Christian, Manuel-Davis wielded
explicitly religious verbiage on the bike—talk of genesis, angels, and
miracles. “‘Enthusiasm’ comes from the Greek word enthous, which means
‘in God,’” she’d preach, thrusting her arms toward the heavens. “Divine
inspiration. Divine inspiration. I want you to be enthusiastic and excited . . .
about this opportunity to close the gap between where you are in your life
and where you were called, created, and intended to be. . . . Every single
one of you was created in purpose, on purpose, for a purpose.” With a deep
understanding of religious speech’s performative power, Manuel-Davis told
audiences, “Life and death is in the power of the tongue. You have the
ability to unlock somebody’s greatness by your words . . . not only to the
people in your life, but to yourself. You are who you say you are.”
These are some hard-core evangelical buzzwords, but Manuel-Davis
attested she wasn’t using them to create insiders and outsiders, or to make
others conform to her ideology. “I give people room to make it about what
they need,” she told Harvard Divinity School. “This is about individual
faith and spirituality.” Those who weren’t feeling it didn’t have to take
Manuel-Davis’s credo with them outside the studio, or even come back at
all—but a whole lot of people did. Manuel-Davis’s classes were known to
sell out within minutes.* “I don’t go to Angela to get a workout; I go to hear
a message,” one rider professed. “Angela sees you. . . . She speaks to your
soul.”
Even with more agnostic instructors, the language rituals of boutique
fitness classes mimic those of religious services. Whether it surrounds God
or crushing your goals, rituals help people feel like they’re a part of
something greater. As Casper ter Kuile put it, they’re a “connective tissue
tool.” Ritual also temporarily removes a person from the center of their own
little universe—their anxieties, their everyday priorities. It helps mentally
transition followers from worldly, self-focused humans to one piece of a
holy group. And then, theoretically, it should allow them to transition back
into real life.
Just as Christian congregates will say the Lord’s Prayer at the same
point in church every week, intenSati instructors and attendees open each
class by joining in what Moreno calls the Warrior Declaration: “Every day
in a very true way, I co-create my reality. As above, so is below, this is what
I know.” Like ministers inviting parishioners to mingle before a service,
SoulCycle instructors encourage students to hobnob with the riders next to
them. “At the beginning of class, everyone has to turn and say hello,
exchange a name, and chat,” explained Sparkie, a “master instructor” in Los
Angeles who’s been with SoulCycle since 2012. “‘You’re going to be
sweating next to them. Get to know them.’ It gives people an opportunity to
connect, because connection is the key.”
November Project’s boot camp–style workouts all start out the same
way, whether you’re in Baltimore or Amsterdam or Hong Kong: Come six
thirty a.m., participants kick off a rallying ritual called “the bounce.”
Gathered in a tight circle, everyone joins in the same script, their voices
crescendoing into a Spartan bellow:
“Good morning!”
“Good morning!!!”
“Y’all good?”
“Fuck yeah!”
“Y’all good?!”
“Fuck yeah!!!”
Then everyone chants, “Let’s go!!!!!” At the end of the session,
participants always take a group photo, turn to someone they don’t know,
introduce themselves, and close out with the same final line: “Have a great
day.”
Ideally, my parents and I would’ve tried out intenSati in person, but in
April 2020, that wasn’t exactly possible. Two weeks into California’s
COVID-19 quarantine, we were forced to exercise at home. I figure,
though, if my thesis about language and power is correct, then Patricia’s
incantations should compel me even through a screen. I didn’t actually
think they’d work, of course. On paper, the workout coalesces two things I
gravely detest: cardio (blegh) and group activities that require you to
awkwardly shout things out loud. In Los Angeles, where I live, a new cult
workout brand pops up every day, and I’ve rolled my eyes at them all.
But there I was, four incantations into an intenSati class, jumping
around and laugh-crying like the suckers I’ve always scorned. After our
mini workout, my mom went off to perform a few solo sun salutations,
while I immediately looked up Patricia Moreno’s virtual class schedule,
thinking, Shit, is this what conversion feels like?
iii.
Fitness may be the new religion, but instructors are the new clergy. The
“cult workout” empire would be nothing without its Patricia Morenos and
Angela Manuel-Davises, who do so much more than guide classes.
Instructors learn followers’ names, Instagram handles, and personal life
details. They hand out their cell phone numbers and counsel followers on
matters as grave as whether they should divorce their spouse or quit their
job. They share intimate stories and hardships from their own lives and
invite followers to reciprocate. Followers form deep-rooted loyalties to their
favorite teachers and start referring to classes not by brand name but by
instructor name. It’s not “I’m going to SoulCycle at four p.m. today and six
p.m. tomorrow,” but “I’m going to Angela’s class today and Sparkie’s class
tomorrow.”
A workout brand is “not so much a ‘cult’ as it is a collection of ‘cults,’”
remarked Crystal O’Keefe, a project manager by day and Peloton apostle
by night. Crystal runs a Peloton-themed podcast and blog called The Clip
Out and is known to her few thousand followers as Clip-Out Crystal. “July
15, 2016, is the day I received my Peloton. I remember it so well,” she
wrote to me sentimentally, like the beginning to her memoir. “I now have
completed almost 700 rides.”
Launched on Kickstarter in 2013, Peloton is a subscription-based fitness
app offering all kinds of online workout classes (termed “shows” in
corporate Peloton-speak). There’s dance aerobics, yoga, Pilates, and, by far
its most popular offering, Spin. Thousands of participants log on from their
garages and basements to ride their $2,000 Peloton-brand stationary bikes,
which stream the shows from built-in touchscreen monitors. Because
Peloton classes are hosted online, as opposed to in limited studio spaces,
thousands of riders can take the same class at once. In 2018, the app
streamed a Thanksgiving “Turkey Burn,” which 19,700 users attended at
the exact same time.
Five years after their initial crowdfunding campaign, Peloton had raised
almost a billion dollars and was deemed the first-ever “fitness unicorn.” A
wellness editor I used to work with assured me that Peloton’s virtual model,
which is simple and nonproprietary, is without question the future of
boutique fitness (a prediction that seems even likelier post-COVID-19,
when workout studios were forced to digitize overnight or die).
On the Peloton app, each rider chooses a username (the cheekier, the
better; there are entire subreddits dedicated to cute Peloton handle ideas:
@ridesforchocolate, @will_spin_for_zin, @clever_username) and has
access to everyone’s speeds, resistance levels, and ranks. These stats appear
on a leaderboard on one side of the screen, which adds a gamified edge to
the experience. After class, riders exchange digital shout-outs, take virtual
selfies with their beloved instructors, and post their numbers on social
media—hashtagged in bulk with #pelofam, #pelotonmom, #onepeloton, etc.
—so their internet pals can like, share, and comment: “Keep up the
energy!!!!!” “Which instructor is your fave?!?!”
Clip-Out Crystal has several faves. She rotates between five or six
Peloton instructors and described them each with adoration and specificity.
She spoke of “gritty, no-nonsense” Robin, who says things like “You can’t
buy hustle at the dollar store” and “I only ride with royalty, straighten that
crown.” Then there are the softies who narrate with easygoing sentiments
like “It’s not that deep,” “Just do your best,” and “If you can’t smile, you’re
going too hard.” She also told me about Peloton’s crown jewel instructor,
Jenn Sherman, known as JSS to her thousands of diehards. JSS is the
subject of a robust Facebook fan page called the “JSS Tribe,” populated by
groupies who would follow her anywhere—a “cult” within a “cult” within a
“cult.”
Boasting an upbeat BFF charisma, Sherman sings on the bike (always
endearingly off-key) to her greatest-hits playlists and curses during difficult
climbs. “Each F-word pushes me harder,” rhapsodized Clip-Out Crystal,
who acknowledges that without a strong oratory style, a Peloton instructor
couldn’t build a cult following. Speech is what constructs that little world
inside the screen, making each “relationship” between guru and follower
feel intimate, like Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson’s voice in the
movie Her.
Companies like Peloton and SoulCycle know that the cultish mystique
of hotshots like JSS is everything. So higher-ups put immense effort into
recruiting magnetic instructors and training them to develop a unique vibe
and vocabulary—a mini cult of their own. Naturally, not just any LA fitness
hottie can teach Spin. You need star power; you need duende. And brands
have devised formidable recruitment strategies to find it. SoulCycle doesn’t
scout fitness trainers—they seek performers: dancers, actors, influencers.
Savvy social butterfly types who know how to captivate an audience. Who
thrive on that dynamic. Instructors need to cultivate a social media persona,
to “live and breathe” the brand even off the clock. Even to strangers on the
phone. When SoulCycle vet Sparkie and I first got on our call, I began with
a customary “Hi, how are you?,” expecting your average “good” or “fine.”
Silly me. Sparkie, as her name suggests, never shuts off. “I’m FABULOUS,
BABE!” she exploded with such speed and buoyancy, I felt winded just
listening. “Better than ever, busier than ever. I’m so busy I don’t even
remember what this interview is about! Nice to meet you!! Who are you
again?!”
SoulCycle’s talent team holds intense, Broadway theater–esque
auditions where the first round of aspiring principals is allotted thirty
seconds to hop on a bike, blast a song, and show they’ve got what it takes.
Finalists enter a rigorous ten-week instructor training program, where they
learn to talk the talk. They pick up all the exclusive terminology—“party
hills” (warm-up exercises), “tapbacks” (a signature move involving zesty
backward butt thrusting), “Roosters” (5 a.m. classes and the “Type A”
riders who take them), “noon on Monday” (a slogan referencing when class
bookings open up each week), and how to make everything sound “soulful”
with a capital S.
Peloton’s exclusive recruitment process is arguably even more intense,
since their online model allows them to maintain a tight roster of only
twenty or so top-tier instructors. To earn initiation into the elite Peloton
fam, aspirants are put through hours of interviews and callbacks with
everyone from marketing experts to producers, and then months of training
to guarantee they’ve got the magnetism to attract thousands to every show.
Sparkie, a born-and-bred LA vegan with lilac hair and sleeves of
rainbow tattoos, gained her passionate SoulCycle following with a
repertoire of kitschy, old-school mottos inspired by her grandfather
(“Anything worth doing is worth doing well!” “It’s not how you start, it’s
how you fucking finish!”). She spent several years heading SoulCycle’s
training program, helping newbies “find their voice” as instructors. “The
key to creating the following is to sound authentic. When you sound like
popcorn, people can hear it,” Sparkie told me. She recalled one nineteen-
year-old trainee who was worried about what words of wisdom she could
possibly offer riders: “And I was like, you’re not going to stand in front of
the woman surviving cancer or the dad supporting a whole family and give
them life wisdom. If you’re like, ‘I know times are hard! You’re going to
get through this!’ they’re going to look at you and be like, ‘What do you
know, child?’ Instead, be the joyous, young, fun being that you are. If
you’re like, ‘Do you guys want to party and have a good time?’ they’re
gonna be like, ‘Yeah! My life sucks right now, and I just want to fucking
party.’”
This combination of optics—from followers’ melodramatic message T-
shirts (“Weightlifting is my religion,” “All I care about is my Peloton, and
like 2 people”) to the liturgical rituals to the super-intimate instructor-
student relationships—seems like overkill. Most of the fitness buffs I spoke
to copped to this. But they also professed that the benefits vastly outweigh
the negatives. Once you get hooked on a workout community, not only are
you going to continue, you’re also going to evangelize it to all your friends
to prove this thing is actually incredible and that you’re not really in a
“cult.” Or at least not a cult any worse than the culture that created you . . .
iv.
In the US, we are taught to fetishize self-improvement. Fitness is a
particularly compelling form of self-improvement because it demonstrates
classic American values like productivity, individualism, and a commitment
to meeting normative beauty standards. The language of cult fitness (“Be
your best self,” “Change your body, change your mind, change your life”)
helps connect aspects of religion—like devotion, submission, and
transformation—to secular ideals like perseverance and physical
attractiveness. Earnestly seeking out a fringe religious community would be
a stretch for many modern citizens, but following that shot of woo-woo
with a chaser of capitalistic ambition makes it go down a little smoother.
With groups from intenSati to CrossFit, we’ve created the secular “cults”
we deserve.
There was a period in history when exercise and American
Protestantism overlapped more explicitly. In the nineteenth century, long
before it was customary for everyday people to work out at all, some of the
only groups that devoutly exercised were Christian Pentecostals, who
promoted fitness as an overtly religious purification process. To them,
idleness and gluttony were offenses punishable by God, while disciplining
the flesh through grueling strength training and fasting was a sign of virtue.
For them, lazing around the house while eating junk food was not a
metaphorical sin, but a literal one. By contrast, some churches nowadays
actively condemn modern gym culture as an overcelebration of the self as
opposed to God. “CrossFit is not like church; it is more like the hospital, or
even the morgue,” critiqued a Virginia-based Episcopal priest in a 2018
blog post. “It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a
place where bad people are loved in their badness. The grace of God is the
only salvation plan that does not lead to burnout.”
It’s hard to conduct a productive conversation with someone who’s
arguing that their understanding of spirituality is “the only” valid one. It’s
also undeniable that American workout culture carries a strong Protestant
charge of its own.
Just look at the general vocabulary we use to talk about fitness: cleanse,
detox, purify, obedience, discipline, perfection. These terms have
unquestionably Biblical undertones, and when repeated day after day, the
language of cleansing and purification can condition listeners to believe that
achieving “perfect fitness” is possible, if you try hard enough, and that it
will in turn “perfect” their whole life. This mentality can feel like a
soothing Epsom salt bath in a society that leaves so many citizens feeling
existentially high and dry. At the same time, it can make participants more
vulnerable to getting involved (and staying involved) with a potentially
power abusive guru.
I’m not the first to notice that the conflation of the work we do on our
bodies and the value of our humanity can sound eerily Amwayian. You can
hear it in statements like “You can get inner peace and flat abs in an
hour”—a promise Tess Roering, former CMO of CorePower Yoga, made of
the brand in 2016. The fitness industry’s maximalist ethos that throwing
yourself wholeheartedly into a program—that working harder and faster,
never quitting, and intensely believing in yourself—will give you flat abs
and inner peace is uncannily reminiscent of the prosperity gospel. This
Amway-esque ambiance is subtler in some studios than it is in others, but
across platforms, a single promise resonates: Your body fat percentage will
drop and your gluteus will elevate, and so will your life’s value, but only
through sweaty, high-priced labor.
You can hear swells of New Thought in CrossFit’s unswerving more-is-
more rhetoric. Capitalizing on the athletic vernacular and warlike delivery
of a drill sergeant, CrossFit trainers (or “coaches,” as they’re called on the
inside) bellow slogans like “Beast mode,” “No guts, no glory,” “Sweating
or crying?,” “The burden of failure is far heavier than that barbell,” and
“Puking is acceptable. . . . Blood is acceptable. Quitting is not.” Invoking
rituals like Hero WoDs (“hero workouts of the day,” move sequences
named after fallen members of the military and law enforcement), they
manufacture the atmosphere of soldiers in training.
CrossFit boasts a staunchly libertarian atmosphere, derived from the
personal politics of its founder, Greg Glassman, who has famously uttered
quotes like “Routine is the enemy” and “I don’t mind being told what to do.
I just won’t do it.” It’s no coincidence, then, that the CrossFit climate is one
of lawlessness, where within the anarchical universe of the box, followers
are not only allowed but encouraged to work out so hard they vomit,
urinate, or end up in the hospital.
Jason, a cancer survivor and ex-CrossFitter who joined his local box on
a quest of self-empowerment after finishing chemotherapy, was forced to
quit after developing chronic shoulder pain and a knee injury so severe, it
required surgery. In a 2013 Medium post about his experience, he wrote,
“The first year was exhilarating. . . . I began bragging about my lifting
numbers, and quickly amped up the frequency of my visits from three to
four, then five days per week. Without even realizing it, I became that
evangelizing asshole.” But eventually, CrossFit’s ungovernable rhetoric,
which conditions members to believe that pushing their bodies to injury is
inevitable and even admirable, caught up to Jason. “The messed-up part is
that injuries in CrossFit are seen as badges of honor, the price of getting
righteously ripped, bro,” he revealed.* So when he complained to his
coaches about the shoulder and knee pain he was experiencing, they gaslit
him into thinking it was all his fault. “You’re supposed to push yourself to
the limit,” Jason wrote, “but when you hit the limit and pay the price,
you’re the idiot who went too far.” “No guts, no glory” may be a tagline,
but it’s also among the thought-terminating clichés CrossFit might use to
silence your grievances.
Many of the fitness fiends I spoke to argued that their group couldn’t
possibly be a real cult because “everybody is welcome.” And while I agree
that you can’t really compare SoulCycle and CrossFit to the likes of
Heaven’s Gate and Scientology, inclusivity isn’t the reason. Why would
they have dedicated so much energy to creating a whole exclusive code
language, if it were? Needless to say, most Americans can’t afford to spend
thousands (if not tens of thousands) a year on exercise. Not to mention the
millions of folks who are BIPOC, disabled, and/or above a size 4, whom the
messaging of these studios often subtly or overtly ostracizes. Many high-
end workout studios adopt a very similar version of the white feminist
#girlboss messaging that can be found in MLMs. (I probably shouldn’t have
been surprised when, a few months after our interview, Sparkie the
SoulCycle instructor became a distributor for “nontoxic” skincare MLM
Arbonne, #bossbabe Instagram posts and all.)
The prosperity gospel says that if you don’t succeed in becoming the
picture of flawless fitness—if you don’t acquire the six-pack and the inner
peace (like if you are poor, marginalized, and can’t clear the structural
hurdles keeping you from those things)—then you deserve to be unhappy
and die early. You didn’t “manifest.” It’s Rich DeVos’s same message, just
delivered in a slightly different dialect.
It might sound cloyingly heartfelt to roar “I am powerful beyond
measure” while punching the air as hard as you can, but it’s nowhere near
as spooky as yoga studios full of rich white women wearing the same
overpriced athleisure, possibly embellished with a bastardized Sanskrit pun
—“Om is where the heart is,” “Namaslay,” “My chakras are aligned AF”—
and calling themselves a “tribe.” Commodifying the language of Eastern
and Indigenous spiritual practices for an elitist white audience while erasing
and shutting out their originators might not seem “culty”—it might just
seem commonplace, which is exactly the problem.
For years, CrossFit HQ denied any suggestion that its culture was
unwelcoming to Black members. But during the Black Lives Matter
protests in June 2020, Greg Glassman shot off a series of racist emails and
tweets (in one, he responded to a post about racism as a public health crisis
with “It’s FLOYD-19”), prompting white CrossFitters to finally start
coming around to what many Black folks had known for decades: The place
was not really “for everyone.” And the linguistic red flags had always been
there: By glorifying the police in the names of its Hero WoDs, CrossFit had
been telling on itself all along. Hundreds of gyms disaffiliated with the
brand, big activewear companies pulled their contracts, and Glassman
stepped down as CEO.
A few months after Glassman’s fall from grace, it was SoulCycle’s turn
for a scandal. In late 2020, things were already going south for the company
due to COVID-19 lockdowns forcing location closures left and right, when
multiple damning exposés surfaced online: According to reporting from
Vox, underneath all the motivational Soulspeak, studios across the country
harbored long track records of toxicity. Cults of personality formed around
certain “Master” instructors, who took advantage by creating hierarchies of
favorite and least favorite clients, giving private “off-the-clock” rides, and
allegedly sleeping with some students. (“Your riders should want to be you
or fuck you” was a mantra instructors reportedly learned and internalized.
One all-star openly referred to her riders as “little sluts.”) Some top
instructors were known for verbally bullying riders and “lesser” employees,
as well as stoking all the studio drama that surrounded them, relishing in
their deification, like high school Queen Bees.
Purportedly, SoulCycle HQ knew of and condoned the bad behavior,
covering up complaints about its most prized instructors making bigoted
side comments to riders and staff. (Let’s just say they involved the words
“Aunt Jemima” and “twinks” and calling curvy staffers “not on brand.”)
Reports of sexual harassment had allegedly been ignored, as well. The
company “treated [instructors] like Hollywood stars anyway,” read one
headline, which Natalia Petrzela DMed me the hour it broke. Insiders
reported that higher-ups threw complaints in the trash, while bankrolling
one implicated instructor’s $2,400 Soho House membership and rental
Mercedes-Benz, like nothing happened. This news didn’t exactly come as a
shock. “When you elevate instructors as godlike, abuses of power will
follow,” Natalia tweeted. “It makes sense that we saw this kind of
reckoning first in yoga, where leaders have long been revered as ‘gurus’; it
was only a matter of time for instructors [with] a ‘cult following.’”
I read a 2020 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology
revealing that folks who received “spiritual training” in certain supernatural
crafts like energy healing and lightwork were more prone to narcissistic
tendencies (bloated confidence in their abilities, increased hunger for
success and social approval, denigration of anyone lacking their self-
evaluated superpowers, etc.). This was compared to people who hadn’t
gone through any spiritual training at all, as well as students studying less
performative disciplines, like meditation and mindfulness. The study
showed that even as these gurus encouraged compassion and self-
acceptance in others, their own egos swelled. “Master” SoulCycle
instructors seem to display a similar response: existing pride in their natural
charisma combined with the company’s extreme training is the recipe for a
god complex closer to that of a 3HO Swami than an ordinary mortal
employed to teach stationary cycling.
As of this writing, SoulCycle hasn’t commented on the specific
accusations or fired any alleged abusers. And CrossFit loyalists have
ensured that their beloved culture—Hero WoDs, beast mode, and all—lives
on, no matter the brand name. Some say the mark of a truly “successful
cult” is the power to outlast the death or cancellation of its founder. In that
case, CrossFit and SoulCycle, alongside Scientology and Amway, have
prevailed—at least so far.
Certainly the whitewashed, Protestant capitalism-fueled language of
“namaslay,” “detoxing,” and “harder faster more” reflects (and perpetuates)
oppressive standards that go beyond fitness. We can find talk of tribes and
“push to your max” in so many American industries, from Wall Street to
Hollywood to Silicon Valley. This language is pervasive and troublesome,
no doubt, but its motives and impact are also importantly different from
those of figures like Jim Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, and Rich DeVos. In the
case of these leaders, the goal was not so much to reinforce the problematic
power structures of our larger society, but more to exploit followers in a
way that directly benefited the guru and only the guru. One type of leader
uses language (perhaps even unwittingly) to support frameworks that
already exist; the other uses language, always deliberately, not to uphold
the current order of things but instead to swoop in and create something
tyrannically new. In the end, some problematic leaders are really just
followers of the larger system. But a truly, destructively cultish leader is one
who wishes to overthrow the system and replace it with something that
grants them ultimate power.
v.
If a fitness brand or leader falls closer to the Scientology end of the
cultish spectrum, you’ll hear it. Tune in to the loaded language, us-versus-
them verbiage, thought-terminators, and verbal abuse that make up the
language of cultish influence, and the leaders’ motives will ring loud and
clear. Examine, for instance, the speech of ill-famed hot yoga guru Bikram
Choudhury . . .
Long before he was sued for sexual assault and fled the United States,
Bikram Yoga’s eponymous founder was a well-known egomaniac and bully.
In the early 1970s, Choudhury moved from Calcutta to Los Angeles, where
he created his hot yoga empire, which boasted 1,650 studios worldwide at
its peak in 2006. During his glory days, Choudhury enjoyed a litany of
nicknames that reflected his bellicose cult of personality—the Anti-Yogi,
the Walter White of yoga, the crowned head of McYoga. He shattered
visions of the peaceful, meditative yoga master by screaming, cursing, and
name-calling in class. The content of his profanity-filled caterwauling
wasn’t Peloton-style inspirational, but instead shamelessly misogynist,
racist, and fat-shaming.
“Suck that fat fucking stomach in. I don’t like to see the jiggle jiggle.”
“Black bitch.”
“Chickenshit.”
These are direct quotes, loudly proclaimed in public.
In his famous teacher trainings, Choudhury preached to sweltering halls
of five-hundred-plus aspiring Bikram instructors, who’d each paid between
$10,000 and $15,000 for the opportunity to follow him. Poised on a high
throne (always equipped with a personal air conditioner), he would bellow
call-and-responses, making no attempt to hide his megalomania. Choudhury
would exclaim, “It’s my way or the . . . ,” and the group would call back in
unison, “Highway!”
“The best food is . . . ?”
“NO FOOD!”
Of course, no one would ever stick around if all Choudhury did was
insult people; like most toxic figures, the slurs and screaming were
juxtaposed with the seductive language of love-bombing. Inside of a
minute, Choudhury might decree your potential to become a brilliant
teacher, call you a bitch, and then serenade you with his mellifluous singing
voice, all while you contorted your body into near-impossible poses in
blistering heat.
But devotees of Choudhury swore he was like “a big kid.” His lullabies
and moodiness, even his tantrums, gave him an “innocent adorable” factor,
they attested. Confirmation bias allowed fans to interpret Choudhury’s
blatant lies (he gloated about winning yoga competitions that never even
took place) and statements of grandeur (“I don’t even sleep thirty hours a
month,” “I’m the smartest man in the world you ever met,” “I’m the only
friend you’ve had in your life”) as “childlike” rather than disturbed. The
sunk cost fallacy told them he’d make their careers if they just attended one
more training.
During his hot yoga workshops, Choudhury’s pupils were known to
pass out, suffer dehydration, and develop upper respiratory infections.
Because they were conditioned to trust their beloved guru as all-knowing,
they learned to disregard their own pain and gut instincts. Choudhury was
also accused of grooming and sexually assaulting at least half a dozen
female trainees. In 2016, the man responded to rape allegations with more
us-versus-them name-calling, hyperbole, and gaslighting: A parody of
himself, Choudhury denounced his accusers as “psychopaths” and “trash,”
adding, “Why would I have to harass women? People spend one million
dollars for a drop of my sperm.” In 2016, Choudhury fled the US without
paying the nearly $7 million he owed survivors in punitive damages, and a
year later, a Los Angeles judge issued a warrant for his arrest. (As of this
writing, he has not been brought to justice and continues to lead teacher
trainings outside the US.)
As soon as Choudhury’s American empire crumbled, another
controversial yoga “cult” took its place: CorePower. After the fall of
Bikram, Denver-based CorePower Yoga swept in and rapidly became the
largest yoga chain in America. While Bikram proudly claimed to be the
“McDonald’s of yoga,” CorePower’s cofounder, the (now deceased) tech
mogul Trevor Tice, self-branded as the “Starbucks of yoga.”
Over the following decade, CorePower faced five federal lawsuits for
the financial exploitation of its instructors and clients, having to forfeit over
$3 million in settlements. Not dissimilar to a pyramid scheme, the studio
pays instructors an unlivable hourly wage, promising raises and promotions
only to those who recruit students to its $1,500 teacher training program.
CorePower instructors are told to deliver their teacher training pitches at the
end of class, after Savasana, the final resting pose. While practitioners lie in
a relaxed, loosey-goosey puddle, teachers offer what CorePower calls a
“personal share” (an intimate disclosure from their lives)—and they’re told
to make it “soul-rocking.”
Soul-rocking is a benchmark piece of CorePower loaded language.
Instructors’ performance is, in fact, judged on how many “souls” they’re
able to “rock” (aka how many students they can get to sign up for teacher
training). After the personal share, instructors are urged to target individual
students, love-bomb them with compliments about their skills and
dedication, and offer to buy them a Starbucks to tell them about becoming a
teacher themselves.
“It was like they saw something special in me,” Kalli, a CorePower
student from Minnesota, told the New York Times in 2019. Kalli had just
finished class one day and was feeling all mellow when her favorite
instructor approached her with a wide smile and told her she thought Kalli
had the chops to do her job. She didn’t disclose the cost of teacher training
(they tell instructors to keep that part “open-ended”); she just showered
Kalli with praise and followed up repeatedly both in and out of the studio.
“It felt like we had a friendship that was really actually not real,” Kalli
reflected.
When Kalli finally found out about the $1,500 price tag, she’d already
been fantasizing for weeks about her dreamy future yoga career. She
couldn’t decline now. Kalli wrote the check and went through the eight-
week program. Only at the end did she find out it didn’t actually qualify her
to teach. Like Scientology’s levels, CorePower waited until they knew she
wouldn’t back out before they mentioned she had to complete an additional
$500 “extensions” course. Kalli ponied up once more. But even after that,
CorePower never offered her a job. That’s because their training program
produces a glut of certified teachers who saturate the market, just like an
MLM. A 2016 survey reported that there are two hopefuls in some form of
teacher training for every employed instructor. “You’re being taught to be
calm and breathe, but at the same time, being taken advantage of,” Kalli
told the press.
One of the phrases CorePower weaponized most successfully was
“return the karma”—an emotionally charged euphemism and thought-
terminating cliché wrapped into one. In Hinduism, karma yoga is one of
three paths to spiritual liberation: It’s learning to lead a life of selfless
service, expecting nothing in return. But at CorePower, “return the karma”
was invoked to coerce teachers into substituting for each other’s classes and
performing hours of mandatory work outside the studio—class prep, email
customer service, marketing for the brand—all without pay. By calling on
such a profound spiritual phrase with eternal implications, the company
could succinctly trigger guilt and loyalty in its employees. If someone
wanted to question an unfair policy, CorePower could just point to “karma”
to smother their claim.
Court documents reveal that CorePower’s own lawyers discredit karma
as a vacant “metaphysical precept” in the same nonsense language category
as “soul-rocking.” But for followers, it was loaded enough to retain their
allegiance even when they knew the company was screwing them. Kalli left
her CorePower career dreams behind to become a registered nurse but
continues to take yoga classes at a local CorePower studio. In order to
afford her $120 monthly membership (she receives no discount for having
gone through teacher training), she works as a cleaner at a different
CorePower location once a week. On the side, she teaches “goat yoga”
(they really do have everything now) at a small farm in the Minneapolis
suburbs. Her bio proudly reads “CorePower Trained Instructor.”
vi.
Upon finding yourself in a cultish fitness community that may or may
not be entirely healthy, here are a few questions worth asking: Is this group
genuinely welcoming of all different people? Or do you feel excessive
pressure to dress and talk like everyone else (even outside of class)? Are
you allowed to participate casually, to dabble in this activity? Or do you
find yourself putting all your time and faith in this group alone, basing all
your decisions on theirs? Do you trust the instructor to tell you to slow
down, maybe even take a few weeks off or try a whole different exercise, if
your body needs it? Or will they only tell you harder, faster, more? If you
miss a class or quit, what is the exit cost? Pride? Money? Relationships?
Your whole world? Is it a price you’re willing to pay?
For me, it’s become easier to spot the difference between a warehouse
full of five hundred yoga trainees war-crying that it’s their leader’s way or
the highway (or a Spin instructor debasing their students as “little sluts”)
and a studio of sixteen women, who are dressed how they like and free to
cancel their memberships without the threat of shame or worse, joining in a
mantra like “I am stronger than I seem.” Both businesses are profiting from
the language, but they’re also literally naming whom they want to
empower: In one case, it’s the guru, and in the other, it’s the people.
“I feel like what ‘cult fitness’ really means is that people are so moved
by something that helps them grow and change,” intenSati’s Patricia
Moreno concluded. Because Moreno’s aim is so transparently to teach her
students to reclaim their own personal power, as opposed to asserting her
power over them, she’s never felt the need to defend intenSati as not a “real
cult.” To me, that lack of defensiveness speaks volumes.
By and large, new religion experts are not terribly concerned that the
drawbacks of cult fitness stack up to the likes of Scientology, either. “I
definitely think some of these workouts are ‘culty,’ but I say that with scare
quotes,” commented Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. The main
“cult” symptom Luhrmann finds in fitness buffs is the belief that if they
attend classes regularly, their lives will dramatically improve overall. As
long as they attend class five times a week and say the mantras, then that
will change the way the world unfolds for them. It’s that sense of excess
idealism again—that conviction that this group, this instructor, these rituals,
have the power to accomplish more than they probably can.
It is entirely possible to exploit that faith. However, what keeps me from
roasting the cult fitness industry too dramatically is that ultimately, you’re
in charge of your own experience. At Spin class, you control the resistance
on your bike; if you want to ignore the “culty lady” at the front of the room
(or onscreen) and slow down, you can. If you pray to a higher power, you
can do that while chanting about divine inspiration. But if you just want to
jump around and party, you can do that, too. And after six months, if things
start to get toxic or you just want to try something else, you’re free to. If the
bonds you built on the leaderboard are really that strong, they’ll last even
after you decide to switch to surfboard Pilates.
After all, the studio is not what singularly gives your life meaning. It
very well might bring you fulfillment and connection for forty-five minutes
at a time, but you’d still be you without it. You’re already blessed with all
you need.
i.
It’s June 2020, one of the most contentious months in contemporary
American history, and my Instagram algorithm is on the fritz. Amid posting
about the global COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter, while
keeping up with all the New Age swamis, MLM recruiters, and conspiracy
theorists I’ve followed over the past year, my Explore page can’t seem to
tell whether I’m a social justice warrior, a Plandemic truther, an antivaxxer,
a witch, an Amway distributor, or just really obsessed with essential oils.
There’s a smug satisfaction that comes with briefly allowing myself to
believe I’ve confused the Instagram Eye, whose presence is so omniscient
and mysterious (and indispensable to me), sometimes it feels like the only
God I’ve ever known.
I suppose I get what I deserve, then, when in the midst of a two-hour
social media binge, I come across the profile of a spiritual guru named
Bentinho Massaro. With an Instagram bio that reads “Synthesizer of Paths,”
“True Scientist,” “Philosopher,” and “Mirror,” Massaro is a thirtysomething
white dude who claims to vibrate at a higher frequency than other humans,
higher even than Jesus Christ. Sporting forty thousand Insta followers, icy-
blue eyes, a robust wardrobe of tight black T-shirts, and a confident voice
cloaked in some indeterminate European accent, he reads like a cross
between Teal Swan and Tony Robbins. A Hemsworth would definitely play
him in the movie. About a dozen proverbial red flags erect in my frontal
cortex. I click Follow.
A deeper dive soon reveals that Bentinho Massaro was born in
Amsterdam but relocated to Boulder, Colorado, and later to the occult
mecca of Sedona, Arizona, to run pricey spiritual retreats. All the while, he
puts spectacular effort into growing his web presence. Using a Silicon
Valley–savvy social media strategy and a portfolio of snazzy websites, he
aims to sell you . . . well, your soul.
Costing as little as an Instagram follow or as much as $600 per hour on
Skype, you can gain access to doses of Massaro’s sacred science—the
answers to everything from how to cultivate profound personal
relationships to how to become “a human god.” In his YouTube videos,
Massaro sits close to the camera, creating the cozy atmosphere of a home
gathering or a one-on-one conversation, as he expounds upon subjects like
“The Inner Black Hole,” “Presence-Energy Vibration,” and “Cutting
Through the Illusion of Mind.” Navigate over to his Instagram and you’ll
find minute-long clips where Massaro just stares intensely into the lens,
grinning, barely blinking, intermittently murmuring, “I love you.” He calls
these parasocial gaze-offs his moments of “oneness—no separation between
you or me.” Hundreds of supporters flood his comments with praise: “You
are infinite intelligence, love/light,” “Thank you Ben for this wave of
consciousness,” “MASTER, teacher, . . . YOU have an amazing ability . . .
Please lead us.”
Massaro’s ideology is, shall we say, eclectic. He believes in ancient
aliens, asserts he can change the weather with his mind, and has announced
that he doesn’t want children because he already has seven billion. It should
sound familiar by now that Massaro insists he, and only he, possesses the
“God’s-eye view” required to guide humanity toward heaven’s “absolute
truth.” His teachings, he proclaims, will lead to the “cessation of suffering
and endless bliss.” Massaro vows that over the course of any given
earthling’s lifetime, they won’t access even “10 percent of what goes on in
[his] consciousness in a single day.” His ultimate vision? To bring his
internet fellowship offline, buy a big slab of land in Sedona, and build an
enlightened new city.
Amid lectures on paths, vibrations, and raising your frequency, some of
Massaro’s rhetoric takes a grim turn. His mystical vernacular is fraught with
thought-terminating clichés, intended to gaslight followers into mistrusting
science, as well as their own thoughts and emotions. In one lesson, he
commands, “Thinking about something is the surest way to miss out on the
beauty of that actual something. . . . See where you have these allegiances
to logic, to reason, to linear description, and simply start destroying these.”
In another video, he shouts at a female student after she expresses feeling
disrespected by the phrase “fuck you,” saying, “If you weren’t so high up in
your own ass about this fucking concept of respect, you would actually see
how much love there is behind me saying what I say.”
Massaro always finds a twisted way to justify his use of verbal
aggression: Once on Facebook, he posted, “Being friends with an awake
being is nearly impossible, because: A) his first priority is your purification
and elevation into truth; not kindness . . . and B) he is not like an ordinary
person and thus cannot be successfully compared with normal standards or
related to as just another person (which the finite mind does not like).” His
shouting and cursing, he says, are an expression of divine kindness. “I can
scream at you all freely,” he declaims, adding that verbal abuse is a
necessary part of the spiritual path, and that questioning it simply reflects
the lowly human’s “limited and opinionated mind.”
As with Teal Swan, Massaro’s videos also promote unsafe messaging
about suicide: “Don’t fear death; be excited about it,” he says in one clip.
“Looking forward to death makes you truly come alive. . . . Wake up to
something important. Otherwise, kill yourself.”
These sentiments mostly flew under the radar until December 2017,
when Massaro hosted a spiritual retreat in Sedona that went horribly wrong.
The twelve-day New Age boot camp was promised to offer one hundred
guests exclusive access to Massaro’s most profound teachings. By then,
“cult leader” accusations had already started trickling onto the web. The
day before the retreat, a Sedona-based reporter named Be Scofield
published an incriminating exposé characterizing Massaro as a “tech bro
guru” using growth-hacker marketing to build a quack spiritual consortium:
endangering followers’ bodies with ridiculous health advice (like living on
nothing but grape juice for weeks—Massaro called this “dry fasting”),
manipulating them into cutting off friends and family (“Fuck your
relationships. They mean nothing,” he’d say), and trusting him as an all-
knowing deity.
On the sixth day of the Sedona retreat, an attendee named Brent
Wilkins, who’d followed Massaro devotedly for years, broke away from the
group. He got in his car, drove to a nearby bridge, and jumped, ending his
life.
News of Wilkins’s death circulated hastily, and a chorus of Jim Jones
comparisons quickly followed. The internet dubbed Massaro an “Instagram
douche meets cult leader” and “Steve Jobs meets Jim Jones.” Massaro was
quiet for months afterward, until he finally posted a response on Facebook,
not addressing the death or any specific concerns but instead firing the
“cult” label right back at Be Scofield. In the ultimate battle of thought-
terminating clichés, he avowed that Scofield was “part of one of the biggest
cults on our planet today: The Average American Cult—indoctrinated by
media, scared of just about anything outside of their own family home, and
ready to pull a gun out on anyone they do not understand.”
The day after Wilkins’s death, detectives showed up at Massaro’s
residence to confront him about his questionable suicide messaging. But in
the end, no charges were brought against him. In a culture where malignant
social media interactions contribute to depression, anxiety, and suicide in
such complicated ways, it was ultimately too tricky to place singular,
prosecutable blame, even on a figure as disreputable as Massaro.
In the end, the Brent Wilkins tragedy didn’t shake the faith of (or even
reach) most of Massaro’s supporters, most of whom never considered
“following” the guy beyond Instagram. Still, over the next few months,
small waves of devotees quietly disconnected from him—clicked
Unsubscribe, excised his lingo from their vocabularies, even joined a
“Bentinho Massaro Recovery Group” on Facebook. Painfully, they came to
the realization that their guru was just a man, poisoned by his own addiction
to a cult much larger than his own—the cult of social media attention.
While they once admired their “spiritual rock star” for using Instagram and
YouTube to make infinite consciousness available to everyone, it became
clear that Massaro’s movement only existed to satisfy his own desire for
adoration, which, thanks to the alternate universe he created for himself
online, became more bottomless every day.
“But I guess this is what a lot of people do on the internet,” commented
Lynn Parry, an ex–Massaro loyalist who was close with Brent Wilkins
before he died, in an interview with the Guardian. “They put out a perfect
persona . . . [and] without meaning to, they make other people feel like
they’re not good enough . . . and for people like Brent, for many of us
really, it’s just too much for the spirit to handle.”
ii.
Flashback two decades before Bentinho Massaro’s retreat-gone-
wrong to 1997, the same year the very first social media site was invented.
In March, when Heaven’s Gate’s mass suicide sent seismic panic
throughout the country, everyday Americans were prompted to wonder
how, oh how, could a clearly deranged UFO-obsessed guy like Marshall
Applewhite provoke such a disaster? When it was suggested that the
Heaven’s Gate website, a cacophony of bright fonts and extraterrestrial
ramblings, might have played a role in recruiting and radicalizing followers,
commentators scoffed. While one New York Times reporter called Heaven’s
Gate “an object lesson in the evils of the Internet,” a journalist from Time
incredulously rebutted, “Spiritual predators? Give me a break. . . . A Web
page that has the power to suck people . . . into a suicide cult? . . . The
whole idea would be laughable if 39 people weren’t dead.”
As far as the average 1990s imagination could stretch, cults required an
in-the-flesh location to have real influence. Without a secluded commune or
isolated mansion, how could anyone possibly become separated from their
family and friends, have their individuality suppressed, and ideologically
convert to a destructive dogma in a way that incited real-world harm?
In the years since Heaven’s Gate, the virtual and physical worlds have
merged. For better and for worse, social media has become the medium
through which millions of us construct kinship and connection in an ever-
transient society. In early 2020, reporter Alain Sylvain wrote that social
media and pop culture have become “the modern-day campfire.” It’s
something that ’90s Time writer couldn’t have predicted: a world where
seekers satisfy their spiritual desires with a hodgepodge of nonreligious
rituals practiced largely online. It’s a world where our closest confidantes
can be found on Beyoncé fan forums and private Peloton Facebook groups,
and where one’s ethics and identity are wrapped up in the influencers they
follow, targeted ads they click through, and memes they repost.
Twenty years post–Heaven’s Gate, most zealous fringe groups rarely
convene IRL. Instead, they build an online system of morality, culture, and
community—and sometimes radicalize—with no remote commune, no
church, no “party,” no gym. Just language. In lieu of a physical place to
meet, cultish jargon gives followers something to assemble around.
When I first downloaded Instagram in the summer of 2012, I couldn’t
help but notice how curious it seemed that the app called its account holders
“followers” instead of friends or connections. “It’s like a cult platform,” I
remember saying to pals. “Is it not encouraging everyone to build their own
little cult?”
I didn’t even know the word “influencer” back then (the term didn’t
become popular until 2016, according to Google search data), so I couldn’t
have foreseen that “spiritual influencers” would soon become a whole
category of new religious leader. Less than a decade after Instagram’s
launch, thousands of astrologers, self-help sages, and holistic wellness
guides like Bentinho Massaro and Teal Swan, who might have never even
developed an interest in metaphysics before the internet (much less
monetized it), use apps and algorithms to spread their gospel. These digital
gurus fulfill modern America’s renewed demand for New Age ideas with
images of tarot readings, updates on the cosmos, and abstract talk of
frequency fields and galactic perspectives. Their high-octane feeds provide
just as much eye candy as a beauty or “lifestyle” influencer, but the
promises are far greater. The Instagram mystic doesn’t operate on a
business model but a spiritual mission; they aren’t just selling spon con and
merch, but transcendent wisdom. Double-tap and subscribe, and you’ll
obtain access to higher vibrations, alternate dimensions, even life beyond
death.
“I’ve asked myself, if Buddha or Jesus lived today, would they have a
Facebook page?” Bentinho Massaro posed in a 2019 interview, adding that
he finds that Instagram lends itself particularly well to the divine. “The
pictures have an energy,” he told the reporter, his glacial eyes glittering.
Brent Wilkins’s suicide was a rare and concretely tragic example of the
fate that can befall a seeker who submerges too deeply in the warped
“reality” of an online guru. But for most people, someone like Massaro is
just another account to thumb past. Unlike the cults of the ’70s, we don’t
even have to leave the house for a charismatic figure to take hold of us.
With contemporary cults, the barrier to entry is the simple frisson of tapping
Follow.
Not every spiritual influencer is hazardous; in fact, many provide what
I’d classify as a largely positive experience, offering inspiration, validation,
and solace, even if just for a moment mid-scroll. In 2018, I investigated the
growing phenomenon of “Instagram witches” for Cosmopolitan.com, and
what I found was a diverse coalition of millennial women and nonbinary
people growing devoted digital followings with whom they attentively
engaged over recipes for plant-based tinctures and astrological insights.
This community of online witches seemed like a haven for many LGBTQ+
and BIPOC folks who felt unwelcome in so many old-school religious
spaces. They’d be practicing their craft either way; Instagram simply gave
them a platform to share it and make a real living out of it. Almost everyone
I investigated seemed genuinely motivated by helping people above
anything else, and no one used the thought-terminating clichés, circuitous
euphemisms, or other intentionally deceptive tactics that we now know
constitute the worst kind of cultish language.
But inevitably, the clout-hungry always find their way to social media—
a machine that works to fuel our scammiest, most narcissistic tendencies.
Reporter Oscar Schwartz wrote for the Guardian that as far as algorithms
are concerned, “there is little difference between the genuine and pernicious
guru.” Spiritual influencers are sanctified by the apps for the same reason
any other content creator is—because their posts are on-trend and hyper-
engaging. They exchange regrammable quotegrams full of buzzy wellness
vernacular for ego-boosting likes and ad dollars, profiting from Apple Pay–
enabled seekers aiming to soothe the distress and ennui of contemporary
existence.
Because their actual beliefs take a back seat to the success of their
brand, these gurus are willing to fudge them according to whatever the
zeitgeist seems to want. If CBD supplements are all the rage, they’ll
suddenly flood their feeds with affiliate posts and act like cannabis has been
part of their ideology all along; if conspiracy theory–type content seems to
be doing well, they’ll head in that direction, even if they don’t fully
understand the volatile rhetoric they’re trafficking in.
Spend a few minutes poking around the Bentinho Massaro borough of
Instagram and you’ll find dozens upon dozens of similar accounts. In one
corner, you’ll find “alternative healing” opportunists masquerading as
benevolent medical professionals. Like . . . “Dr.” Joe Dispenza, a generic-
looking middle-aged white guy who well over a million Instagram
followers somehow trust as their New Age sage. Dispenza’s army of
adoring acolytes claim he’s helped them manifest everything from their
dream job to their spouse to their cancer remission. Dispenza shrewdly
exploits SEO and other web-marketing strategies to make millions selling
an extravagant emporium of self-help workshops and retreats, public
speaking engagements, corporate consultations, guided meditations, CDs,
gifts, and books like Becoming Supernatural and Evolve Your Brain.
Branding himself as the ultimate “scientific” spiritual authority, Dispenza’s
Instagram bio reads “Researcher of epigenetics, quantum physics &
neuroscience,” and he proudly flaunts his studies in biochemical sciences at
Rutgers University, as well as his “postgraduate training and continuing
education”—whatever that means—“in neurology, neuroscience, brain
function and chemistry, cellular biology, memory formation, and aging and
longevity.” Taking a page out of L. Ron Hubbard’s playbook, Dispenza
marries academic-sounding language with the paranormal. Examine, for
instance, his definition of a quantum field: “an invisible field of energy and
information—or you could say a field of intelligence or consciousness—
that exists beyond space and time. Nothing physical or material exists there.
It is beyond anything you can perceive with your senses.”
Needless to say, most followers don’t have a background in
neuroscience or quantum mechanics, so they hear the esoteric jargon and—
using a System 1 thought process—they conclude that Dispenza must be
legit. “He’s mainly speaking to people who may have little to no academic
understanding of these fields but the words are a literal inaccurate
description of the quantum field,” commented Azadeh Ghafari, a licensed
psychotherapist and frequent exposer of digital wellness scammers on her
Instagram account, @the.wellness.therapist. “To say that ‘nothing physical
or material exists there’ is not only categorically false but shows that this
person does not have a present-day understanding of what is called the
vacuum state or the quantum vacuum.” Ghafari suggests this litmus test:
“Anytime any New Age guru making $$ from the stuff they’re peddling
utters the words ‘quantum’ anything, give them a basic physics equation
(DM me for some). If they can’t solve it, move along.” The internet
scammeth, and the internet fact-checketh away.
Indeed, a quick probe reveals that Dispenza never graduated from
Rutgers and has no PhD. His only diplomas include a general BS from
Evergreen State College and a degree from a chiropractic school in Georgia
called Life University. And yet google Dispenza’s credentials, and his
exceptionally well-optimized web presence will provide the top result: “Dr.
Joe Dispenza is a well-known neuroscientist.” As a white man in his fifties,
just the kind of guy our culture wants a neuroscientist to look and sound
like, he is largely trusted without question.*
In a nearby ZIP code of the guru-sphere, you’ll find twentysomething
women adding an antiestablishment flavor to aspirational Insta-baddie
branding. Blond and blue-eyed, Heather Hoffman (@activationvibration) is
typically found bralette-clad, sporting an ornate septum piercing alongside
appropriative face jewels. Her ultra-produced, triple-filtered images feature
rainbow lens flares and jewel-tone lotus blossoms that accompany daily
affirmations just vague enough to sound profound (e.g., “Receive the
succulence of your own source, and your external seeking shall cease”). Her
long, convoluted captions feature a dialect of New Age–speak so cryptic
that insiders want to like and comment, while outsiders can’t help but keep
scrolling through to find out what her beliefs actually are: “integrating
potent codes,” “quantum transformation,” “multidimensional space of
time,” “divine alignment,” “upgrading your DNA,” “energy matrices, grids,
and frequencies.”
In one video, Heather squats on the floor in a green bikini, playing
Tibetan sound bowls, undulating her torso. Using a honeyed soprano, she
begins speaking a form of glossolalia she calls “Light Language.” The
comment section overflows with all kinds of “divine goddess,”
“hypnotizing,” and “Heather you are next level light code!” In another clip,
she sits before a mandala tapestry lecturing that COVID-19 was caused by
government “fear propaganda” and that protecting yourself means
“deactivating” your “matrix grid of fear” so as not to pollute the “divine
order.” Heather has been reincarnated precisely to cure humans of problems
like these, she says, through her ability to access “Source” (God) and other
spiritual “realms” available only to her, since everyone else has fallen
victim to a “program.” To access her wisdom, just sign up for one of her
online courses, like the “Cellular Activation Course—Upgrade Your DNA”
for $144.44, or, to tap into her most exclusive wisdom, pay $4,444 for eight
one-on-one mentoring sessions.
Creeping along the influence continuum toward Scientology, these
figures will cajole you into buying their e-book, then their meditation
playlist, then their online hypnosis course, and by that point, your spiritual
journey would be worthless if you didn’t sign up for a workshop or retreat.
For you, it might feel like the quest for self-actualization, but for them, it’s a
profitable, scalable, passive-income-generating cash cow.
Ghafari points out that when an online guru uses too much “absolutist
language,” that’s New Age scammer red flag number one. “Anyone who
talks about the concept of feeling our past, our inner trauma, in a universal,
oversimplified way,” she clarifies. “For example, statements like, ‘All of us
are traumatized as kids, which is why we need to x, y, z,’ or, ‘All of us are
from the cosmos and we’re just floating in a quantum field, blah blah
blah.’” If simple quantifiers and qualifiers are absent from a guru’s
messaging, that’s a sign they are likely unqualified to speak as a mental
health authority, and are less interested in actually helping people than they
are in convincing as many followers as possible to invest in their prophetic
gifts.
“New Age holistic psychology and wellness is not about trauma-
informed care. It’s about pushing pseudoscience and marketing,” Ghafari
concludes. Alternative wellness gurus like Bentinho Massaro and Heather
Hoffman fume about the evils of Big Pharma until they’re blue in the face.
“But they push a far more deceptive form of capitalism,” says Ghafari.
They don’t want to sell you pills. They want to sell you a key to
enlightenment they don’t actually possess.
To some onlookers, mystical Insta scammers might not seem like that
much of a threat; you’d have to be seriously out of touch to put real faith in
these people, right? But researchers have found that the folks most attracted
to New Age rhetoric are more with-it than one might think. Michael
Shermer, a science writer and founder of the Skeptics Society, has written
about the correlation between intelligence and belief in “weird ideas.”
According to Shermer, studies show that American test subjects with the
lowest education levels have a higher probability of subscribing to certain
paranormal beliefs, like haunted houses, Satanic possession, and UFO
landings; but it’s test subjects with the most education who are likeliest to
believe in New Age ideas, like the power of the mind to heal disease.
Psychologist Stuart Vyse has remarked that the New Age movement “has
led to the increased popularity of [supernatural] ideas among groups
previously thought to be immune to superstition: those with higher
intelligence, higher socioeconomic status, and higher educational levels.”
Therefore, he remarks, the age-old view that people who believe in “weird”
things are less intelligent than nonbelievers may not hold entirely true.
Objectively, made-up metaphysical interpretations of “quantum fields”
and “upgrading your DNA” are just as irrational as ghosts and alien
visitations; but the fact that they’re associated with a demographic of social
media–savvy young people with college degrees makes them seem more
acceptable. It’s not that smart people aren’t capable of believing in cultish
things; instead, says Shermer, it’s that smart people are better at “defending
beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.” Most people, even skeptics
and scientists, don’t come to the bulk of their beliefs for reasons having to
do with empirical evidence. No one sits down and reads a bunch of
scientific studies, then weighs the pros and cons before deciding to believe
that, say, money equals happiness, or that cats are better than dogs, or that
there’s only one right way to clean a colander. “Rather,” Shermer says,
“such variables as genetic predispositions, parental predilections, sibling
influences, peer pressures, educational experiences, and life impressions all
shape the personality preferences and emotional inclinations that, in
conjunction with numerous social and cultural influences, lead us to make
certain belief choices.”
This is all to say, being smart and hip to the zeitgeist is not enough to
protect someone from cultish influence online. And even if shady social
media characters like Joe Dispenza and Bentinho Massaro don’t seem like
that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, by contributing to a world that
values “Light Language” and sci-fi physics over real science, as if facts are
just opinions, they wind up making space for more urgently dangerous
groups to take advantage.
It’s exactly this paranoiac rejection of “mainstream” healthcare and
leadership that gave such momentum to QAnon, whose rhetoric overlaps
considerably with that of the “alternative wellness” sphere: “great
awakening,” “ascension,” “5G.” The diagram of QAnon and New Agers
looks more circular every day. It appeared an unlikely crossover, at first:
that of violent right-wing conspiracy theorists and seemingly progressive
hippie types. But America’s ever-escalating unrest has led a disarming
number of citizens (mostly white, middle class ex-Christians—similar to
the folks who joined Heaven’s Gate back in the day) to a similarly anti-
government, anti-media, anti-doctor place.
In the early 2010s, well before QAnon, the term “conspirituality” (a
portmanteau of “conspiracy” and “spirituality”) was introduced to describe
this rapidly growing politico-spiritual movement defined by two core
principles: “the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in
the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the
political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’
in consciousness” (this definition comes from a 2011 paper from the
Journal of Contemporary Religion).
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in 2020, it was like rocket
fuel feeding conspirituality’s flame.
Antivaxxers and Plandemic truthers would fall squarely into the
category of conspirituality, but so would plenty of less conspicuously
QAnon-related wellness aficionados: the sorts who might sign up for an
essential oils MLM, for example, or wear “Namaslay” T-shirts to their
whitewashed yoga classes, or run a “holistic self-care” Instagram account.
The sorts who maybe searched for “all-natural health remedies” on
YouTube one night and ended up in “all doctors are brainwashed”
conspirituality territory, unable to navigate their way out. Trickily, not every
conspiritualist even knows or is willing to admit that their beliefs have
anything to do with QAnon. In fact, some of these believers regard the
terms “QAnon,” “conspiracy theorist,” and “antivaxxer” as offensive
“slurs.” And the more outsiders invoke these labels, the more firmly
insiders dig in their heels. After all, both camps think the other is
“brainwashed.”
In broad strokes, QAnon started in 2017 as a fringe-y online conspiracy
theory surrounding an alleged intelligence insider called Q. The ideology
began as something like this: Q, a faceless figure, swore to have “proof” of
corrupt left-wing leaders—“the deep state,” or “global elite”—sexually
abusing little kids around the world. (According to Q, Donald Trump was
working tirelessly to thwart them before being “fraudulently” dethroned.)
The only way to undo this evil cabal of high-powered liberal predators was
with the support of Q’s loyalists, known as “Q Patriots” or “bakers,” who’d
hunt for meaning in their anonymous leader’s secret clues—“Q drops” or
“crumbs”—which were sprinkled throughout the web. To trust in Q meant
to reject mainstream government, vehemently scorn the press, and contest
doubters at every turn. It’s all a necessary part of the ongoing “paradigm
shift.” QAnon developed rallying cries, including “You are the news now”
and “Enjoy the show,” referencing the impending “awakening,” or
apocalypse.
In September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll reported that over half of
the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s
theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further
down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque,
flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even knows about (at
least not at first): theories about Jeffrey Epstein co-conspiring with Tom
Hanks to molest hordes of minors, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of
children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old
ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond.
But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical
far-right extremists. Take a soft turn to the left, and you’ll find a more
outwardly palatable denomination of conspiritualists whose paranoias might
be slightly less focused on Hillary Clinton worshipping Satan and more on
Big Pharma forcing evil Western medicine on them and their kids. These
believers wield a slightly different glossary of loaded terms, some co-opted
from feminist politics—like “forced penetration” (which conflates
vaccination with sexual assault) and “my body, my choice” (an
antivaxx/anti-mask slogan purloined from the pro-choice movement).
Because social media algorithms track people’s keywords in order to feed
them only what they’re already interested in, a sprawling spiderweb of
customized QAnon offshoots was able to form.
In this manner, with language as its matter and energy, QAnon became
like a black hole sucking in every breed of cultish twenty-first-century
believer that crossed it. That’s part of why its central buzzwords—like the
“deep state,” “mainstream media,” and “paradigm shift”—are so lofty and
vague; they work to reel in and bond recruits without revealing too much.
It’s not unlike how Scientology conceals the language of their bizarre upper
levels so as not to lose new followers. Akin to a horoscope, the generic
posts allow participants to convince themselves that they’re being spoken to
uniquely—like this community singularly holds the answers to the world’s
suffering—all the while camouflaging the fact that a unified belief system
doesn’t actually exist.
Like most manipulative cults, QAnon’s magnetism is largely the
promise of special foreknowledge, which is available only to members of
its enlightened underground collective. This allure is constructed with (and
this will sound quite familiar now) an exhaustive sociolect of insider-y
acronyms and keyboard symbols, “us”/“them” labels, and loaded language.
In QAnon-speak, CBTS stands for “calm before the storm,” “truth seekers”
are followers, and ignorant outsiders are “sheeple” or “agents of the elite.”
#Savethechildren is an innocent-sounding QAnon shibboleth stolen from
real child trafficking activists, used to hide in plain sight and attract
newcomers. “5D consciousness” is a level of enlightenment that becomes
available to insiders during turbulent times, “ascension” is a loaded
buzzword used to explain away symptoms of anxiety or cognitive
dissonance, and “looking at all viewpoints” is one of many euphemisms
equating evidence and fantasy.
The glossary goes on and on. And it’s always changing, branching off
into different “dialects” of QAnon-ese, in order to accommodate new
additions to the belief system . . . and, so that social media algorithms don’t
catch up, flag the language, and block or shadowban the accounts using it.
New code words, hashtags, and rules for how to use them are introduced all
the time. QAnon followers (some of whom are influencers with acolytes of
their own) stand by for updates, often choosing to post only in their
ephemeral Instagram Stories—the social media equivalent of “this message
will self-destruct in 24 hours.” This creates an even deeper level of
exclusivity for the followers following them. To put it crudely, with QAnon,
there are cults inside cults inside cults inside cults; it’s the ultimate cult-
ception, and social media made it possible.
Depending on their subsect of beliefs, QAnon participants feel free to
define the broad talk of “sheeple” and “5D” in whatever way “resonates.”
After all, for them, “truth is subjective.” It doesn’t matter to them that some
interpretations of this language have led to enough real-world violence* that
QAnon has become one of the most threatening domestic terror groups of
our time. It also doesn’t matter that at its core, QAnon is just another
madcap apocalyptic cult in a line of them that goes back centuries. The
updated cast of characters is new, and so is the medium of social media, but
baseless doomsday predictions and ideas of dark forces secretly controlling
everything are practically trite.
All this and still, those wrapped up in the QAnon-to-conspirituality
“culture of shared understanding” will find a way to keep rolling with it no
matter what. Any question or wrinkle can be conveniently dismissed with
one of their go-to thought-terminating clichés, like “Trust the plan,” “The
awakening is bigger than all of this,” “The media is propaganda,” and “Do
your research,” which refers to the process of falling down an obsessed,
confirmation-biased rabbit hole online, revealing a fantasy world of
explanations for things that feel inexplicable.
If this all sounds like a dystopian video game, that’s part of the “fun.”
There’s a reason Q’s original timbre was so conspiratorial it sounded like a
made-for-TV movie: “Follow the money,” “I’ve said too much,” “Some
things must remain classified to the very end.” QAnon has been described
as “an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game” where online users play
their imaginary roles as bakers, hungrily anticipating the puzzle of each
new crumb. According to UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, this sort
of virtual treasure hunt creates a form of conditioning called a variable-ratio
schedule, where rewards are dispensed at unpredictable intervals. Like
online gaming or gambling or even the erratic intoxication of when you’ll
get your next social media “like”—that feeling that keeps you refreshing
your feed—QAnon’s immersive experience generates a kind of compulsive
behavior similar to addiction. In a cognitive analysis of QAnon for
Psychology Today, Pierre noted that with QAnon, “the conflation of fantasy
and reality isn’t so much a risk as a built-in feature.”
Some of the psychological quirks thought to drive conspiracy theory
belief in general, Pierre writes, include a craving for uniqueness, plus the
needs for certainty, control, and closure that feel especially urgent during
crisis-ridden times. With all their plot twists and good/evil binaries,
conspiracy theories seize our attention, while supplying simple answers to
unresolved questions. “Conspiracy theories offer a kind of reassurance that
things happen for a reason, and can make believers feel special that they’re
privy to secrets to which the rest of us ‘sheeple’ are blind,” Pierre explains.
After platforms like Twitter and Instagram started catching on to the
dangers of QAnon and cracking down, supporters had to get more creative
with their language in order to communicate without getting deleted. This is
part of why QAnon messages began appearing in the form of aesthetic
quotegrams: graphically designed maxims that blend in with the “keep calm
and manifest”–type self-care memes innocently populating most users’
Instagram feeds. This development soon became known as “Pastel QAnon.”
Quotegrams—with their comely fonts and generic syntax—serve as a
form of loaded language themselves, designed to yank on users’
heartstrings, to get them to like and repost without much thought. It’s what
allowed one clever troll in 2013 to get away with Photoshopping Hitler
quotes over images of Taylor Swift—obscure ones pulled from Mein Kampf
(“The only preventable measure one can take is to live irregularly,” “Do not
compare yourself to others. If you do so, you are insulting yourself”). The
memer uploaded his creations to Pinterest and watched smugly as fans
reposted them all over the web. The point was to prove the extreme
devotion of impressionable young Swifties, and their eagerness to instantly
and unquestioningly share all things Tay.
There’s a religious power in quotegrams that far predates social media.
Our love of a pithy adage in square form is connected to the needlepointed
psalms on display in religious aunts’ powder rooms. But it even goes back
further than that, to—can you guess the era?—the Protestant Reformation,
when there was a big shift in focus away from religious imagery (stained
glass, Last Supper frescoes) and onto text. “There was an increasing
discomfort with the ambiguity you get from images,” commented Dr.
Marika Rose, a Durham University research fellow in digital theology, in
Grazia magazine. “So a Protestant valuing of the Bible made it a much
more text-based religion.” Ever since, our culture has looked to snack-size
proverbs for guidance and gospel, convinced that when it comes to written
quotes, what you read is what you get. On the internet, however, a
mysterious epigram with no clear source can serve as an on-ramp leading
seekers to something much more sinister.
With no tangible organizational structure, no single leader, no cohesive
doctrine, and no concrete exit costs, QAnon is not exactly in the same
cultish category as, say, Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown. But a fully immersed
QAnon follower couldn’t just go cold turkey. For those fully submerged in
the world of “the awakening” and “the research,” climbing out of the rabbit
hole could mean a profound psychological loss: a loss of “something to
occupy one’s time, of feeling connected to something important, of finally
feeling a sense of self-worth and control during uncertain times,” elucidates
Pierre. Even if former believers come out to denounce QAnon, the
existential consequences are enough to keep true die-hards under.
Not everyone finds their way into a QAnon-level internet cult, but
platforms from Facebook to Tumblr are what help life feel important and
connected for so many of us. The way I see it, while celebrities and
conspiritualists create their own cult followings online, the ultimate pseudo-
church to which billions of us belong—even (and especially) figures like
Dr. Joe Dispenza and Donald Trump—is social media itself.
In a sense, we can’t even claim to be growing “less religious” when
social media’s job is explicitly to generate ideological sects, to pack
people’s feeds with suggested content that only exaggerates what they
already believe. As each of us posts, curating our individual online
identities, the apps capture those personas via metadata and reinforce them
through irresistible targeted ads and custom feeds. No “cult leader” takes
advantage of our psychological drives quite like The Algorithm, which
thrives on sending us down rabbit holes, so we never even come across
rhetoric we don’t agree with unless we actively search for it. The way we
make choices—from our clothes all the way to our spiritual and political
beliefs—is a direct consequence of these uncanny digital versions of
ourselves. In her book Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton wrote, “America
is not secular but simply spiritually self-focused.” In a social media–
centered society, we’ve all been rendered at once cult leader and follower.
iii.
It would be easy enough for me to write off all these groups, from
SoulCycle to Instagram, as cultish and thus evil. But in the end, I don’t
think the world would benefit from us all refusing to believe or participate
in things. Too much wariness spoils the most enchanting parts of being
human. I don’t want to live in a world where we can’t let our guards down
for a few moments to engage in a group chant or mantra. If everyone feared
the alternative to the point that they never took even small leaps of faith for
the sake of connection and meaning, how lonely would that be?
Studies of famous scientists’ personalities and their receptivity to
offbeat beliefs show that excessive cynicism actually stymies discovery.
Science writer Michael Shermer found that iconic brains like paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould and astronomer Carl Sagan scored off the charts in both
conscientiousness and openness to experience, indicating an ideal balance
between being pliant enough to accept the occasional kooky claim that
turned out to be correct, but not so credulous that they fell for every
outlandish theory they stumbled across. “Sagan, for example, was open to
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which, at the time, was
considered a moderately heretical idea,” said Shermer. “But he was too
conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and
aliens have actually landed on earth.” Long story short, sometimes when
something sounds too wacky to be true, it really is that delightfully—
truthfully—wacky.
Some say people who join cults are “lost.” But all human beings are lost
to some degree. Life is disorderly and confusing for absolutely everyone. A
more thoughtful way to think about how people find themselves in
precariously cultish scenarios is that these folks are actively searching to be
found, and—because of variations in genes and life experiences and all the
complicated factors that make up human personalities—they’re more open
than the average person to finding themselves in unusual places. To stay
safe requires just the right combination of fact-checking, cross-checking,
and amenability to the idea that spiritual fulfillment may very well come
from unexpected sources.
I also don’t think it’s helpful to decide there’s something naturally,
defenselessly malevolent about the everyday “cults” to which most humans
belong. SoulCycle is not Scientology. Instagram influencers are not Jim
Jones. And as we’ve learned, invoking sensationalized “cult leader”
comparisons to denounce any group that rubs us the wrong way can create
confusion surrounding what the hazards being critiqued even are. It can
create active harm. We know this from the siege of the Branch Davidian
compound, when the FBI was so scandalized into believing Waco was
bound to become “another Jonestown” that they themselves wound up
causing an avoidable calamity. Now Waco acts as perverse inspiration for
some of those anarchical right-wing internet groups, who view dying in an
FBI standoff as the ultimate martyrdom. Events like this serve as proof that
overlooking the nuances of cultish communities only perpetuates a culture
of hyperbole and chaos.
The fact is that most modern-day movements leave enough space for us
to decide what to believe, what to engage with, and what language to use to
express ourselves. Tuning in to the rhetoric these communities use, and how
its influence works for both good and not so good, can help us participate,
however we choose, with clearer eyes.
Growing up on my dad’s Synanon stories—his daily escapes to the
forbidden high school in San Francisco, his experiments in the
microbiology lab—taught me that as much as good moods and optimism
can make a person more susceptible to suspicious influence, they can also
lift someone out of a truly dark situation. With the right amount of judicious
questioning, taking care never to abandon your logical thoughts or
emotional instincts (which are there for a reason), one can ensure they stay
connected to themselves through anything from an isolated commune to an
oppressive start-up job to a scammy Instagram guru.
Above all else, it’s important to maintain a vigilant twinkle in your eye
—that tingle in your brain that tells you there’s some degree of metaphor
and make-believe here, and that your identity comes not from one swami or
single-minded ideology but from the vast amalgam of influences,
experiences, and language that make up who you are. As long as you hang
on to that, I think it’s possible to engage with certain cultish groups,
knowing that at the end of the day, when you come home or close the app,
strip off the group’s linguistic uniform, and start speaking like yourself
again, you’re not all in.
When I began writing this book, I was a touch concerned that by the
end, all this cult research would just turn me into an antisocial,
misanthropic version of myself. And even though I do feel more
hyperaware than ever of the varying dialects of Cultish that imbue our daily
lives, I’ve also gained a stronger sense of compassion. While I’m hardly
likelier to move to a Shambhala-esque co-op or put my loyalty into some
Instagram conspiritualist myself, I have acquired a newfound ability to
suspend harsh judgment of those who might. This comes from knowing that
one’s out-of-the-box beliefs, experiences, and allegiances are less a mark of
individual foolishness and more a reflection of the fact that human beings
are (to their advantage and their detriment) physiologically built to be more
mystical and communal than I knew.
It’s in our DNA to want to believe in something, to feel something,
alongside other people seeking the same. I’m confident there’s a healthy
way to do that. Part of me thinks it’s actually by becoming a part of several
“cults” at once—like our Jonestown survivor Laura Johnston Kohl
exchanging her one-commune lifestyle for involvement in a medley of
separate groups. That way, we’re free to chant, to hashtag, to talk of
manifesting and blessings, to use glossolalia even . . . to speak some form
of Cultish . . . all the while staying tethered to reality.
So let’s try again: Come along. Join me. Life is much too peculiar to go
at it all alone.
Acknowledgments
It takes so many generous people to make a book like this possible.
First, a gigantic thank-you to my many sources (including those whose
interviews didn’t end up in the book but were still invaluable). I appreciate
your time, expertise, reflection, and vulnerability more than I can say. What
made this book especially neat was that it reconnected me to so many
friends and family members I hadn’t spoken to in years. Leave it to the
oddly universal topic of cults to bring us back together.
To my wonderful editors, Karen Rinaldi and Rebecca Raskin, for your
continual belief and investment in me. And to the rest of my fabulous,
enthusiastic Harper Wave team: Yelena Nesbit, Sophia Lauriello and Penny
Makras.
To my literary agent, Rachel Vogel, who actually belongs to the next
evolutionary level above human. I feel so lucky to have you as a
representative and friend. Big thanks as well to Olivia Blaustein, for your
constant championing. And to my book launch guru Dan Blank, for “just
adding the water.”
To my inspiring, supportive family, to whom I owe everything: my
parents, Craig and Denise, and my brother, Brandon. Thank you for passing
on the curiosity and skepticism. Special thanks to you, Mom, for helping
with the title. To you, Brandon, for reading and nitpicking. And to you,
Dad, for the many riveting cult stories. As always, I wait on the edge of my
seat for your memoir.
To my sweet, encouraging friends, mentors, and creative collaborators,
especially Racheli Alkobey, Isa Medina, Amanda Kohr, Koa Beck, Camille
Perri, Keely Weiss, Azadeh Ghafari, Joey Soloway, and Rachel Wiegand.
Rae Mae, can you believe that creepy conversation we had at Pioneer
Cemetery in early 2018 actually became a book? Wild.
To my wonderfully engaged community of Instagram “followers”: You
make the internet feel like a decent place to be.
To Katie Neuhof for the killer author photo, and to Lacausa Clothing
and Sargeant PR for the incredible dress.
To my right-hand woman, Kaitlyn McLintock—this book could not
have happened without your dedication, reliability, and sunshiny mettle.
To my faithful canine and feline assistants: Fiddle, Claire, and
especially my buddy David. I couldn’t have gotten through this year
without you, my coccolone.
And finally, to Casey Kolb. My soul mate, best friend, duet partner,
sounding board, quarantine-mate, and one-man fan club. If there were a cult
of CK, I’d join in a heartbeat.
Notes
Part 1: Repeat After Me . . .
i.
head of all Western Sikhs: Steven Hassan, “The Disturbing Mainstream Connections of Yogi
Bhajan,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011, http://huffpost.com/entry/the-disturbing-
mainstream_b_667026.
their shopping bags: Chloe Metzger, “People Are Freaking Out Over This Shady Hidden Message on
Lululemon Bags,” Marie Claire, October 11, 2017,
https://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/a28684/lululemon-tote-bag-sunscreen/.
ii.
rubbernecking: SBG-TV, “Can’t Look Away from a Car Crash? Here’s Why (and How to Stop),”
WTOV9, May 1, 2019, https://wtov9.com/features/drive-safe/cant-look-away-from-a-car-crash-
heres-why-and-how-to-stop.
iii.
Civic engagement is at a record-breaking low”: Alain Sylvain, “Why Buying Into Pop Culture and
Joining a Cult Is Basically the Same Thing,” Quartz, March 10, 2020, https://qz.com/1811751/the-
psychology-behind-why-were-so-obsessed-with-pop-culture/.
loneliness an “epidemic”: Neil Howe, “Millennials and the Loneliness Epidemic,” Forbes, May 3,
2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2019/05/03/millennials-and-the-loneliness-epidemic/?
sh=74c901d57676.
since the time of ancient humans: M. Shermer and S. J. Gould, Why People Believe Weird Things
(New York: A. W. H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2007).
feel-good chemicals: Jason R. Keeler et al., “The Neurochemistry and Social Flow of Singing:
Bonding and Oxytocin,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (September 23, 2015): 518, DOI:
10.3389/fnhum.2015.00518.
group chanting and singing: Jacques Launay and Eiluned Pearce, “Choir Singing Improves Health,
Happiness—and Is the Perfect Icebreaker,” The Conversation, October 28, 2015, https://the
conversation.com/choir-singing-improves-health-happiness-and-is-the-perfect-icebreaker-47619.
engage in ritualistic dances: Brandon Ambrosino, “Do Humans Have a ‘Religion Instinct’?,” BBC,
May 29, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190529-do-humans-have-a-religion-instinct.
a desire for belonging and purpose: Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong:
Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin
117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529,
http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/hortonr/articles%20for%20class/baumeister%20and%20leary.pdf.
four in ten millennials: “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace,” Pew Research
Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, June 9, 2020, https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-
decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/.
up nearly 20 percentage points: “‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public
Life Project, May 30, 2020, https://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.
Harvard Divinity School study: Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile, “How We Gather,” Harvard
Divinity School, https://caspertk.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/how-we-gather1.pdf.
the “Nones” and the “Remixed”: Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless
World (New York: PublicAffairs, Hachette Book Group, 2020).
encroaching Roman Empire: Holland Lee Hendrix, “Jews and the Roman Empire,” PBS, April 1998,
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/portrait/jews.html.
the US is exceptional: Jonathan Evans, “U.S. Adults Are More Religious Than Western Europeans,”
Fact Tank (blog), Pew Research Center, May 31, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
tank/2018/09/05/u-s-adults-are-more-religious-than-western-europeans/.
“The Japanese and the Europeans”: David Ludden, “Why Do People Believe in God?,” Psychology
Today, August 21, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-apes/201808/why-do-
people-believe-in-god.
iv.
“forever forming associations”: Alain Sylvain, “Why Buying Into Pop Culture and Joining a Cult Is
Basically the Same Thing,” Quartz, March 10, 2020, https://qz.com/1811751/the-psychology-behind-
why-were-so-obsessed-with-pop-culture/.
“Cults” of the time: Elizabeth Dunn, “5 19th-Century Utopian Communities in the United States,”
History.com, January 22, 2013, https://www.history.com/news/5-19th-century-utopian-communities-
in-the-united-states.
“cult film” and “cult classic”: Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema: An Introduction
(Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 234.
pledge-hazing rituals: John Marr, “A Brief History of the Brutal and Bizarre World of Fraternity
Hazing,” Gizmodo, September 20, 2015, https://gizmodo.com/a-brief-history-of-the-brutal-and-
bizarre-world-of-frat-1733672835.
brainwashing presents an untestable hypothesis: Rebecca Moore, “The Brainwashing Myth,” The
Conversation, July 18, 2018, https://theconversation.com/the-brainwashing-myth-99272.
not all “cults” are depraved or perilous: Laura Elizabeth Woollett, “The C-Word: What Are We
Saying When We Talk About Cults?,” Guardian, November 18, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/nov/19/the-c-word-what-are-we-saying-when-we-talk-
about-cults.
didn’t set out with murder and mayhem in mind: Jane Borden, “What Is It About California and
Cults?,” Vanity Fair, September 3, 2020, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/09/california-
cults-nxivm-the-vow.
condemn the Quakers: Eileen Barker, “One Person’s Cult Is Another’s True Religion,” Guardian,
May 29, 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/29/cults-new-religious-
movements.
“cult + time = religion”: Joe Posner and Ezra Klein, “Cults,” Explained, Netflix.
To quote Megan Goodwin: Tara Isabella Burton, “The Waco Tragedy, Explained,” Vox, April 19,
2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/19/17246732/waco-tragedy-explained-david-koresh-mount-
carmel-branch-davidian-cult-25-year-anniversary.
“unworthy of postmortem respect”: Woollett, “The C-Word.”
v.
“If the boundaries between cult and religion”: Tara Isabella Burton, “What Is a Cult?,” Aeon, June 7,
2017, https://aeon.co/essays/theres-no-sharp-distinction-between-cult-and-regular-religion.
“reach toward what we did not yet know or understand”: Gary Eberle, Dangerous Words: Talking
About God in an Age of Fundamentalism (Boston: Trumpeter, 2007).
Part 2: Congratulations—You Have Been Chosen to Join the Next
Evolutionary Level Above Human
i.
“top annoying cliché”: James D. Richardson, “The Phrase ‘Drank the Kool-Aid’ Is Completely
Offensive. We Should Stop Saying It Immediately,” Washington Post, November 18, 2014,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/18/the-phrase-drank-the-koolaid-is-
completely-offensive-we-should-stop-saying-it-immediately/.
“so odious”: Lesley Kennedy, “Inside Jonestown: How Jim Jones Trapped Followers and Forced
‘Suicides’,” History.com, A&E Television Networks, November 13, 2018,
https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide.
“It makes me shudder”: Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, “Drinking the Kool-Aid: A Survivor Remembers
Jim Jones,” The Atlantic, November 18, 2011,
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/drinking-the-kool-aid-a-survivor-remembers-
jim-jones/248723/.
“revolutionary suicide”: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Q042 Transcript,” The Jonestown
Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, June 16, 2013,
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29081.
the “Rainbow Family”: Lauren Effron and Monica Delarosa, “40 Years After Jonestown Massacre,
Ex-Members Describe Jim Jones as a ‘Real Monster,’” ABC News, September 26, 2018, https://abc
news.go.com/US/40-years-jonestown-massacre-members-describe-jim-jones/story?id=57933856.
hybristophilia: Eliza Thompson, “3 Experts Explain Why Some People Are Attracted to Serial
Killers,” Cosmopolitan, February 14, 2018,
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a17804534/sexual-attraction-to-serial-killers/.
“sexual appeal”: Melissa Dittmann, “Lessons from Jonestown,” Monitor on Psychology 34, no. 10
(November 2003): 36, https://www.apa.org/monitor/nov03/jonestown.
“He appealed to anyone”: David M. Matthews, “Jim Jones’ Followers Enthralled by His Skills as a
Speaker,” CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/11/13/jonestown.jim.jones/.
his “little Angela Davis”: Sikivu Hutchinson, “No More White Saviors: Jonestown and Peoples
Temple in the Black Feminist Imagination,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University
Department of Religious Studies, October 5, 2014 (updated May 30, 2020),
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=61499.
“the fading promise of the Black Power movement”: Sikivu Hutchinson, “Why Did So Many Black
Women Die? Jonestown at 35,” Religion Dispatches, December 12, 2013, https://religion
dispatches.org/why-did-so-many-black-women-die-jonestown-at-35/.
“I was just enthralled”: Effron and Delarosa, “40 Years After Jonestown Massacre, Ex-Members
Describe Jim Jones as a ‘Real Monster.’”
Known for quotes: Fielding M. McGehee III, “Q932 Summary,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego
State University Department of Religious Studies, June 16, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?
page_id=28323.
Laura Johnston Kohl: Joseph L. Flatley, “Laura Johnston Kohl and the Politics of Peoples Temple,”
The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, October 25,
2017, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=70639.
White Nights: “What Are White Nights? How Many of Them Were There?,” The Jonestown
Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, June 15, 2013 (updated
October 6, 2013), https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=35371.
Christine Miller: Michael Bellefountaine, “Christine Miller: A Voice of Independence,” The
Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, July 25, 2013,
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=32381.
the Death Tape: Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple authors, “The Death
Tape”, The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious Studies, July
25, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29084.
ii.
Jonestown mass death: Lauren Effron and Monica Delarosa, “40 Years After Jonestown Massacre,
Ex-Members Describe Jim Jones as a ‘Real Monster,’” ABC News, September 26, 2018, https://abc
news.go.com/US/40-years-jonestown-massacre-members-describe-jim-jones/story?id=57933856.
ended in the suffix –ody: u/Apatamoose, “Is there a list anywhere tying the-ody names of the
Heaven’s Gate members with their legal names?,” Reddit, February 26, 2018,
https://www.reddit.com/r/Heavensgate/comments/80fmt5/is_there_a_list_anywhere_tying_the_ody_
names_of/.
who belonged to Heaven’s Gate: Frank Lyford, “About My New Book,” Facilitating You,
http://facilitatingu.com/book/.
“severe inability to speak”: Margeaux Sippell and Tony Maglio, “‘Heaven’s Gate’ Docuseries: Why
Does Frank Lyford’s Voice Sound Like That?” TheWrap, December 3, 2020,
https://www.thewrap.com/heavens-gate-docuseries-hbo-max-frank-lyford-voice.
You can see it yourself: Heavens Gate Remastered, “Heaven’s Gate Class Exit Videos,” YouTube,
April 9, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2D4wUF1EKQ.
iii.
Michelle Carter court case: “Woman Who Convinced Friend to Commit Suicide Released from Jail,”
CBS This Morning, YouTube, January 24, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPX
57hWAKo8.
conversion, conditioning, and coercion: Rebecca Moore, “The Brainwashing Myth,” The
Conversation, July 18, 2018, https://theconversation.com/the-brainwashing-myth-99272.
what makes people stick: Laura Elizabeth Woollett, “What I Learned About the Jonestown Cult by
Spending Time with Survivors,” Refinery29, February 26, 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-
gb/jonestown-massacre-book.
problematic populist: Cas Mudde, “The Problem with Populism,” Guardian, February 17, 2015,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-
side-europe.
similarities between Trump and Jim Jones: Steven Hassan, The Cult of Trump (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2019).
zingy, incendiary nicknames: Caroline Howe, “Exclusive: Fake Enemies, Loaded Language,
Grandiosity, Belittling Critics: Cults Expert Claims Donald Trump’s Tactics Are Taken Straight from
Playbook of Sun Myung Moon, David Koresh and Jim Jones,” Daily Mail, October 9, 2019,
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7552231/Trumps-tactics-taken-playbook-cult-leaders-like-
Jim-Jones-David-Koresh-says-author.html.
Trump’s populist language: George Packer, “The Left Needs a Language Potent Enough to Counter
Trump,” The Atlantic, August 6, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/language-
trump-era/595570/.
with these stock sayings: Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study
of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961).
calling someone “brainwashed”: Alla V. Tovares, “Reframing the Frame: Peoples Temple and the
Power of Words,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University Department of Religious
Studies, July 25, 2013, https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=31454.
Jones enforced a “quiet rule”: Lesley Kennedy, “Inside Jonestown: How Jim Jones Trapped
Followers and Forced ‘Suicides,’” History.com, February 20, 2020,
https://www.history.com/news/jonestown-jim-jones-mass-murder-suicide.
iv.
known style of delivery labeled “the voice of God”: Jessica Bennett, “What Do We Hear When
Women Speak?,” New York Times, November 20, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/us/politics/women-voices-authority.html.
not the most useful way to evaluate their specific danger: Rebecca Moore, “Godwin’s Law and
Jones’ Corollary: The Problem of Using Extremes to Make Predictions,” Nova Religio 22, no. 2
(2018): 145–54.
Teal Swan: Jennings Brown, The Gateway, Gizmodo, May 21, 2018,
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-gateway-teal-swan.
“I can’t stop thinking about her pores”: Maureen O’Connor, “I Think About This a Lot: The Beauty
Habits of This Possible Cult Leader,” The Cut, August 27, 2018, https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/i-
think-about-this-a-lot-teal-swan-beauty-habits.html.
v.
Moonie careers: Eileen Barker, “Charismatization: The Social Production of an ‘Ethos Propitious to
the Mobilisation of Sentiments,’” in Secularization, Rationalism, and Sectarianism: Essays in
Honour of Bryan R. Wilson, eds. Eileen Barker, James A. Beckford, and Karel Dobbelaere (Oxford,
UK: Clarendon Press, 1993), 181–201.
“we selectively recruited”: Steven Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (Rochester, Vermont: Park
Street Press, 1988).
the reason why Black women: Sikivu Hutchinson, “No More White Saviors: Jonestown and Peoples
Temple in the Black Feminist Imagination,” The Jonestown Institute, San Diego State University
Department of Religious Studies, October 5, 2014 (updated May 30, 2020),
https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=61499.
classic confirmation bias: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” The New
Yorker, February 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-
change-our-minds.
hypochondria, prejudice, and paranoia: M. Shermer and J. S. Gould, Why People Believe Weird
Things (New York: A. W. H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2007).
Part 3: Even YOU Can Learn to Speak in Tongues
i.
an interview for the role of Tom Cruise’s girlfriend: Molly Horan, “This Actress Auditioned To Be
Tom Cruise’s Girlfriend — But Never Wanted The Part,” Refinery29, August 1, 2016,
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/08/118620/tom-cruise-girlfriend-audition-cathy-
schenkelberg.
the device “itself does nothing”: David S. Touretzky, “Inside the Mark Super VII,” Secrets of
Scientology: The E-Meter, Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science,
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/E-Meter/Mark-VII/.
ii.
the door locked behind me: Steve Mango, “Inside the Scientology Celebrity Centre: An Ex-
Parishioner Reveals All,” YouTube, January 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=LfKqOUMrCw8&t=.
Billion-Year Contract: Margery Wakefield, “The Sea Org—‘For the Next Billion Years . . . ,’” in
Understanding Scientology: The Demon Cult (Lulu, 2009).
It’s called TR-L: Margery Wakefield, “Declaration of Margery Wakefield,” Operation Clambake,
June 23, 1993, https://www.xenu.net/archive/go/legal/wakefiel.htm.
A “dynamic” in Scientology: “The Eight Dynamics,” Scientology.org,
https://www.scientology.org/what-is-scientology/basic-principles-of-scientology/eight-
dynamics.html.
iii.
“religious language ‘performs’ rather than ‘informs’”: Gary Eberle, Dangerous Words: Talking About
God in an Age of Fundamentalism (Boston: Trumpeter, 2007).
Christian-affiliated direct sales: Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling
Organizations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Jesus as a marketing ploy: “How a Dream Becomes a Nightmare,” The Dream, Stitcher, October 22,
2018, https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream/e/56830345.
iv.
Chögyam Trungpa: Paul Wagner, “Chögyam Trungpa: Poetry, Crazy Wisdom, and Radical
Shambhala,” Gaia, January 21, 2020, https://www.gaia.com/article/chogyam-trungpa-poetry-crazy-
wisdom-and-radical-shambhala.
Hubbard was obsessed with space fantasy: “Written Works of L. Ron Hubbard,” Wikipedia, August
17, 2020 copycat “cult leaders”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_works_of_L._Ron_Hubbard.
you can look up portions of the Technical Dictionary online: Scientology Glossary: UVWXYZ,
Scientology Critical Information Directory, https://www.xenu-
directory.net/glossary/glossary_uvwxyz.htm.
copycat “cult leaders”: Kenzie Bryant, “How NXIVM Used the Strange Power of Patents to Build Its
‘Sex Cult,’” Vanity Fair, June 27, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/06/keith-raniere-
nxivm-patents-luciferian; Gina Tron, “ESP, DOS, Proctors, and More: NXIVM Terminology,
Explained,” Oxygen, August 27, 2020, https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/what-does-nxivm-
terminology-like-dos-esp-mean.
in Scientology, it has but one solitary definition: Margery Wakefield, Understanding Scientology:
The Demon Cult (Self-Published, Lulu, 2009).
insider-y acronyms and abbreviations: Margery Wakefield, “The Language of Scientology—ARC,
SPS, PTPS and BTS,” June 23, 1993, https://www.xenu.net/archive/go/legal/wakefiel.htm.
an entirely plausible conversation between Scientologists: Wakefield, Understanding Scientology.
“bypassed charge”: Clerk, “Bypassed Charge; Bypassed Charge Assessment,” January 1, 1975,
http://www.carolineletkeman.org/c/archives/1439.
for his blog: Mike Rinder, “The Horrors of Wordclearing,” Something Can Be Done About It, July
27, 2016, https://www.mikerindersblog.org/the-horrors-of-wordclearing/.
v.
signs of stress reduction: Christopher Dana Lynn et al., “Salivary Alpha-Amylase and Cortisol
Among Pentecostals on a Worship and Nonworship Day,” American Journal of Human Biology 22,
no 6 (November–December 2010): 819–22, DOI: 10.1002/ajhb.21088.
lack of self-consciousness and feelings of transcendent bliss: Junling Gao et al., “The
Neurophysiological Correlates of Religious Chanting,” Scientific Reports 9, no. 4262 (March 12,
2019), DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-40200-w.
glossolalia seemed to provoke greater intensity of faith: Edward B. Fiske, “Speaking in Tongues Is
Viewed by Psychologist as ‘Learned,’” New York Times, January 21, 1974,
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/01/21/archives/speaking-in-tongues-is-viewed-by-psychologist-as-
learned-some.html.
a form of dissociation: Dirk Hanson, “Speaking in Tongues: Glossolalia and Stress Reduction,” Dana
Foundation, October 23, 2013, https://www.dana.org/article/speaking-in-tongues-glossolalia-and-
stress-reduction/.
“required to speak in tongues in front of everyone”: “True Story: My Family Was in a Cult,” Yes and
Yes, https://www.yesandyes.org/2010/11/true-story-my-family-was-in-cu.html.
Flor spent most of her ’80s-era childhood in Thailand: Flor Edwards, “I Grew Up in the Children of
God, a Doomsday Cult. Here’s How I Finally Got Out,” Huffington Post, December 6, 2018,
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/children-of-god-cult_n_5bfee4a3e4b0e254c926f325.
vi.
“the supplication for the Sakyong”: Russell Rodgers, “Longevity Supplication for Sakyong Mipham
Rinpoche,” Shambhala Times, April 3, 2009, https://shambhalatimes.org/2009/04/03/the-longevity-
supplication-for-sakyong-mipham-rinpoche/.
a series of grievous reports: Andy Newman, “The ‘King’ of Shambhala Buddhism Is Undone by
Abuse Report,” New York Times, July 11, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/nyregion/shambhala-sexual-misconduct.html.
Part 4: Do You Wanna Be a #BossBabe?
i.
“Have you ever thought about turning that energy into a side hustle?”: Eric Worre, “The Hottest
Recruiting Scripts in MLM,” Network Marketing Pro,
https://networkmarketingpro.com/pdf/the_hottest_recruiting_scripts_in_mlm_by_eric_worre_networ
kmarketingpro.com.pdf.
LuLaRoe: Charisse Jones, “LuLaRoe Was Little More Than a Scam, a Washington State Lawsuit
Claims,” USA Today, January 28, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/28/lularoe-
pyramid-scheme-duped-consumers-washington-suit-says/2700412002/.
Tupperware: Cristen Conger, “How Tupperware Works,” HowStuffWorks, July 25, 2011,
https://people.howstuffworks.com/tupperware2.htm.
The Federal Trade Commission sent warnings: Lisette Voytko, “FTC Warns 16 Multi-Level
Marketing Companies About Coronavirus .” Forbes, June 9, 2020,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/06/09/ftc-warns-16-multi-level-marketing-
companies-about-coronavirus-fraud/?sh=12d56c827b9d.
to throw plastic confetti: Lawrence Specker, “It Wasn’t Easy, But Mobile Now Has a 21st Century
Confetti Policy,” Mobile Real-Time News, August 7, 2018,
https://www.al.com/news/mobile/2018/08/it_wasnt_easy_but_mobile_now_h.html.
schemes both pyramid and Ponzi: Christopher Jarvis, “The Rise and Fall of Albania’s Pyramid
Schemes,” Finance & Development 37, no. 1 (March 2000),
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm; Antony Sguazzin, “How a ‘Giant
Ponzi Scheme’ Destroyed a Nation’s Economy,” Bloomberg, February 27, 2019,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-28/how-a-giant-ponzi-scheme-destroyed-a-
nation-s-economy.
pyramid schemes don’t announce themselves as such: Bridget Casey, “Your Gifting Circle Is a
Pyramid Scheme,” Money After Graduation, August 24, 2015,
https://www.moneyaftergraduation.com/gifting-circle-is-a-pyramid-scheme/.
MLM recruits: “Do You Party?,” The Dream, October 15, 2018,
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream/e/56722353.
a “morally superior way of being in the economy”: Nicole Woolsey Biggart, Charismatic Capitalism:
Direct Selling Organizations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
“MLM Quotes”: Chuck Holmes, “Top 50 MLM Quotes of All Time,” OnlineMLMCommunity.com,
October 10, 2013, https://onlinemlmcommunity.com/my-top-50-favorite-mlm-quotes/.
“mental warfare”: Alley Pascoe, “5 Women Reveal the Moment They Realised They Were in a
Pyramid Scheme,” Marie Claire, November 29, 2019, https://www.marieclaire.com.au/multi-level-
marketing-pyramid-schemes-women-survivors.
ii.
Mormons, as direct sales leaders have discovered, are an ideal sales force: “Leave a Message,” The
Dream, podcast, November 2018, https://open.spotify.com/episode/14QU34m1rYlF9xliSWlM5l.
“nose to the grindstone”: Amelia Theodorakis, “Why Would ‘You Keep Nose to the Grindstone’
Anyway?,” Your Life Choices, December 8, 2016,
https://www.yourlifechoices.com.au/fun/entertainment/keep-your-nose-to-the-grindstone.
big American business: “The Rise of Big Business,” in 1912: Competing Visions for America,
eHISTORY, Ohio State University, https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/1912/trusts/RiseBigBusiness.
values and rituals: Michael G. Pratt, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ambivalent: Managing
Identification Among Amway Distributors,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September
2000): 456–93, DOI: 10.2307/2667106.
the very meaning of life: Nathalie Luca, “Multi-Level Marketing: At the Crossroads of Economy and
Religion,” in The Economics of Religion: Anthropological Approaches, vol. 31, eds. Lionel Obadia
and Donald C. Wood (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011).
spiritually charged promises: C. Groß, “Spiritual Cleansing: A Case Study on How Spirituality Can
Be Mis/used by a Company,” Management Revu 21, no. 1 (2010): 60–81, DOI: 10.5771/0935-9915-
2010-1-60.
iii.
“heavenly deception”: Steve Keohane, “Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church,” Bible Probe, April
2007, https://www.bibleprobe.com/moonies.htm.
get involved without their husbands’ “permission”: “The Husband Unawareness Plan,” F.A.C.E.S
(Families Against Cult-like Exploitation in Sales), https://marykayvictims.com/predatory-tactics/the-
husband-unawareness-plan/.
“God’s laws”: “Amway Speaks: Memorable Quotes,” Cult Education Institute,
https://culteducation.com/group/815-amway/1674-amway-speaks-memorable-quotess.html.
Trump made a killing from his endorsements of several MLMs: James V. Grimaldi and Mark
Maremont, “Donald Trump Made Millions from Multilevel Marketing Firm,” Wall Street Journal,
August 13, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-made-millions-from-multilevel-marketing-
firm-1439481128.
Trump and his three children could be sued for fraud: Lisette Voytko, “Judge Rules Trump Can Be
Sued for Marketing Scheme Fraud,” Forbes, July 25, 2019,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/25/judge-rules-trump-can-be-sued-for-
marketing-scheme-fraud/?sh=7448b2516395.
iv.
gullibility: Joseph Paul Forgas, “Why Are Some People More Gullible Than Others?,” The
Conversation, March 30, 2017, https://theconversation.com/why-are-some-people-more-gullible-
than-others-72412; Daniel Kahneman, “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel 2002,” NobelPrize.org, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-
sciences/2002/kahneman/biographical/.
human-reasoning flaws: Elizabeth Kolbert, “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” The New Yorker,
February 27, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-
minds.
differences in trust: “Trust: The Development of Trust,” Marriage and Family Encyclopedia, JRank,
https://family.jrank.org/pages/1713/Trust-Development-Trust.html.
better at sensing deception: Joseph P. Forgas, “On Being Happy and Gullible: Mood Effects on
Skepticism and the Detection of Deception,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44, no. 5
(September 2008): 1362–67, DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.04.010.
v.
reeked of the stock exchange: Molly Young, “Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak the
Way They Do?,” Vulture, February 20, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-
speak.html.
psychopathic tendencies: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “1 in 5 Business Leaders May Have
Psychopathic Tendencies—Here’s Why, According to a Psychology Professor,” CNBC, April 8,
2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-many-successful-millionaires-
are-psychopaths-and-why-it-doesnt-have-to-be-a-bad-thing.html.
Leadership Principles: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a
Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015,
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-
workplace.html.
vi.
“strangest politician”: Staff, “The Troubled World of William Penn Patrick,” Los Angeles Times,
August 16, 1967.
“Tell [recruits] they’re going to be happier”: The Dream, Stitcher, October 22, 2018,
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream
Part 5: This Hour Is Going to Change Your Life . . . and Make You
LOOK AWESOME
i.
cult-favorite workout: Rose Surnow, “Love, Sweat and Tears: Intensati Kicks Your Ass and Cleanses
Your Soul,” Cosmopolitan, July 16, 2013, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-
fitness/advice/a4579/patricia-moreno-finds-thinner-peace/.
do it in groups: David Nield, “Working Out in a Group Could Be Better for You Than Exercising
Alone,” Science Alert, November 5, 2017, https://www.sciencealert.com/working-out-in-groups-
better-than-exercising-alone.
endorphins surge even more powerfully: “Group Exercise ‘Boosts Happiness,’” BBC News,
September 15, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8257716.stm.
yoga had already existed for millennia: “Yoga: How Did It Conquer the World and What’s
Changed?,” BBC, June 22, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-40354525.
outing himself as a shameless racist: “CrossFit: CEO Greg Glassman Steps Down After Racist
Tweet,” Diario AS, October 6, 2020,
https://en.as.com/en/2020/06/10/other_sports/1591791315_063019.html.
health and fitness industry was worth over $32 billion in 2018: Jenny Weller, “Why the Fitness
Industry Is Growing,” Glofox, November 15, 2019, https://www.glofox.com/blog/fitness-industry/.
millennials are unsatisfied with their healthcare: “How Millennials are Redefining Healthcare Today:
Are You Behind?” Multiple Chronic Conditions Resource Center, 2018, https://www.multiple
chronicconditions.org/assets/pdf/Aging%20in%20America/How_Millennials_are_Redefining_Healt
hcare%20(1).pdf.
“radio calisthentics”: “The Japanese Morning Exercise Routine—Rajio-Taiso —JAPANKURU.”
Japankuru Let’s share our Japanese Stories!, March 29, 2020,
https://www.japankuru.com/en/culture/e2263.html.
young people’s disillusionment with traditional faith: “‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Center,
October 9, 2012, https://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise/.
the ways millennials find community and transcendence: Tom Layman, “CrossFit as Church?
Examining How We Gather,” Harvard Divinity School, November 4, 2015,
https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2015/11/04/crossfit-church-examining-how-we-gather#.
El Monte’s “Zumba Ladies”: Carribean Fragoza, “All the Zumba Ladies: Reclaiming Bodies and
Space through Serious Booty-Shaking.” KCET, January 1, 2017, https://www.kcet.org/history-
society/all-the-zumba-ladies-reclaiming-bodies-and-space-through-serious-booty-shaking.
The fitness “movement”: Meaghen Brown, “Fitness Isn’t a Lifestyle Anymore. Sometimes It’s a
Cult,” Wired, June 30, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/06/fitness-isnt-lifestyle-anymore-
sometimes-cult/.
devout Peloton user: Amy Larocca, “Riding the Unicorn: Peloton Accidentally Built a Fitness Cult.
A Business Is a Little More Complicated,” The Cut, October 17, 2019,
https://www.thecut.com/2019/10/peloton-is-spinning-faster-than-ever.html.
“dark times”: Zan Romanoff, “The Consumerist Church of Fitness Classes,” The Atlantic, December
4, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/my-body-is-a-temple/547346/.
“SoulCycle is like my cult”: Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston, “How We Gather (Part 2):
SoulCycle as Soul Sanctuary,” On Being (blog), July 9, 2016, https://onbeing.org/blog/how-we-
gather-part-2-soulcycle-as-soul-sanctuary/.
“I want the next breath to be an exorcism”: Alex Morris, “The Carefully Cultivated Soul of
SoulCycle.” The Cut, January 7, 2013. https://www.thecut.com/2013/01/evolution-of-soulcycle.html.
ii.
“hills” monologues: “Soul Cycle Instructor and Motivational Coach Angela Davis Reminds You That
You Are More Than Enough!,” Facebook Watch, SuperSoul, April 23, 2018,
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1612129545501226.
“Enthusiasm” comes from the Greek: OWN, “Enthusiasm: With Angela Davis: 21 Days of
Motivation & Movement,” YouTube, August 8, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=bhVfjuwptJY&ab_channel=OWN.
“created in purpose”: OWN, “Angela Davis: Finding Your Purpose: SuperSoul Sessions,” YouTube,
May 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnwdpC0Omk4&ab_channel=OWN.
Manuel-Davis resigned from SoulCycle: Chris Gardner, “Celebrity Soul-Cycle Instructor Angela
Davis Joins Akin Akman as Co-Founder of AARMY Fitness Studio,” Hollywood Reporter,
November 21, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-reporter/celebrity-soulcycle-
instructor-angela-davis-joins-akin-akman-as-founder-aarmy-fitness-studio-1256636.
“I go to hear a message”: Erin Magner, “How to Create a Powerful, Purposeful Life, According to
LA’s Most Inspiring Fitness Instructor,” Well+Good, July 14, 2016,
https://www.wellandgood.com/how-to-create-a-powerful-purposeful-life-angela-davis-soulcycle/.
iii.
Broadway theater–esque auditions: Victoria Hoff, “Inside the Ultra-Competitive ‘Auditions’ to
Become a Cycling Instructor,” The Thirty, March 8, 2018, https://thethirty.whowhatwear.com/how-
to-become-a-spin-instructor/slide2.
iv.
exercise and American Protestantism: R. Marie Griffith, Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in
American Christianity (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004).
“CrossFit is not like church”: Connor Gwin, “My Church Is Not CrossFit,” Mockingbird, September
12, 2018, https://mbird.com/2018/09/my-church-is-not-crossfit/.
eerily Amwayian: Zan Romanoff, “The Consumerist Church of Fitness Classes,” The Atlantic,
December 4, 2017, https://www.the atlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/my-body-is-a-
temple/547346/.
“You can get inner peace and flat abs in an hour”: Alice Hines, “Inside CorePower Yoga Teacher
Training,” New York Times, April 6, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/style/corepower-
yoga-teacher-training.html.
fallen members of the military: Robbie Wild Hudson, “Hero CrossFit Workouts to Honour Fallen
American Soldiers,” Boxrox Competitive Fitness Magazine, February 17, 2020, https://www.box
rox.com/hero-crossfit-workouts-to-honour-fallen-american-soldiers/.
the personal politics of its founder, Greg Glassman: Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “CrossFit Founder Greg
Glassman: ‘I Don’t Mind Being Told What to Do. I Just Won’t Do It,’” Reason, August 28, 2017,
https://reason.com/2017/08/28/crossfits-conscious-capitalism/.
ex-CrossFitter: Jason Kessler, “Why I Quit CrossFit,” Medium, July 15, 2013,
https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/why-i-quit-crossfit-f4882edd1e21.
rhabdomyolysis: Janet Morrison et al., “The Benefits and Risks of CrossFit: A Systematic Review,”
Workplace Health and Safety 65, no. 12 (March 31, 2017): 612–18, DOI: 10.1177/216507991668
5568.
Uncle Rhabdo: Eric Robertson, “CrossFit’s Dirty Little Secret,” Medium, September 20, 2013,
https://medium.com/@ericrobertson/crossfits-dirty-little-secret-97bcce70356d.
“Pukie”: Mark Hay, “Some CrossFit Gyms Feature Pictures of These Puking, Bleeding Clowns,”
Vice, June 21, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/yweqg7/these-puking-bleeding-clowns-are-a-
forgotten-part-of-crossfits-past.
Commodifying the language of Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practices: Rina Deshpande, “Yoga in
America Often Exploits My Culture—but You May Not Even Realize It,” SELF, October 27, 2017,
https://www.self.com/story/yoga-indian-cultural-appropriation.
CrossFit HQ denied any suggestion: Gene Demby, “Who’s Really Left Out of the CrossFit Circle,”
Code Switch, NPR, September 15, 2013,
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/15/222574436/whos-really-left-out-of-the-crossfit-
circle.
track records of toxicity: Alex Abad-Santos, “How SoulCycle Lost Its Soul.” Vox, December 23,
2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22195549/soulcycle-decline-reopening-bullying-bike-
explained.
allegedly sleeping with: Matt Turner, “SoulCycle’s Top Instructors Had Sex with Clients, ‘Fat-
Shamed’ Coworkers, and Used Homophobic and Racist Language, Insiders Say.” Business Insider,
November 22, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/soulcycle-instructors-mistreated-staff-slept-
with-riders-2020-11.
studio drama: Bridget Read, “The Cult of SoulCycle Is Even Darker Than You Thought.” The Cut,
December 23, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/12/the-cult-of-soulcycle-is-even-darker-than-you-
thought.html.
covering up complaints: Katie Warren, “SoulCycle’s top instructors had sex with clients, ‘fat-
shamed’ coworkers, and used homophobic and racist language, but the company treated them like
Hollywood stars anyway, insiders say.” Business Insider, November 17, 2020,
https://www.businessinsider.com/soulcycle-instructors-celebrities-misbehavior-2020-11.
v.
Walter White of yoga: Lisa Swan, “The Untold Truth of Bikram Yoga,” The List, March 20, 2017,
https://www.thelist.com/50233/untold-truth-bikram-yoga/.
rape allegations: Jenavieve Hatch, “Bikram Yoga Creator Loses It When Asked About Sexual
Assault Allegations,” Huffington Post, October 28, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bikram-
choud hury-loses-it-when-asked-about-sexual-assault-allegations_n_58139871e4b0390e69d0014a.
Part 6: Follow for Follow
i.
“Thinking about something”: Be Scofield, “Tech Bro Guru: Inside the Sedona Cult of Bentinho
Massaro,” The Guru Magazine, December 26, 2018, https://gurumag.com/tech-bro-guru-inside-the-
sedona-cult-of-bentinho-massaro/.
“tech bro guru”: Be Scofield, “Tech Bro Guru: Inside the Sedona Cult of Bentinho Massaro,” Integral
World, December 26, 2018, http://www.integralworld.net/scofield8.html.
quack spiritual consortium: Jesse Hyde, “When Spirituality Goes Viral,” Playboy, February 18, 2019,
https://www.playboy.com/read/spirituality-goes-viral.
social media interactions contribute to depression, anxiety, and suicide: David D. Luxton, Jennifer D.
June, and Jonathan M. Fairall, “Social Media and Suicide: A Public Health Perspective,” American
Journal of Public Health (May 2012), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477910/.
the cult of social media attention: Oscar Schwartz, “My Journey into the Dark, Hypnotic World of a
Millennial Guru,” Guardian, January 9, 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/09/strange-hypnotic-world-millennial-guru-bentinho-
massaro-youtube.
ii.
“the evils of the Internet”: Mark Dery, “Technology Makes Us Escapist; The Cult of the Mind,” New
York Times Magazine, September 28, 1997,
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/28/magazine/technology-makes-us-escapist-the-cult-of-the-
mind.html.
“Spiritual predators? Give me a break”: Josh Quittner, “Life and Death on the Web,” Time, April 7,
1997, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,986141,00.html.
“modern-day campfire”: Alain Sylvain, “Why Buying Into Pop Culture and Joining a Cult Is
Basically the Same Thing,” Quartz, March 10, 2020, https://qz.com/1811751/the-psychology-behind-
why-were-so-obsessed-with-pop-culture/.
the word “influencer”: Jane Solomon, “What Is An ‘Influencer’ And How Has This Word Changed?”
Dictionary.com, January 6, 2021,
https://www.dictionary.com/e/influencer/#:~:text=The%20word%20influencer%20has%20been,
wasn't%20a%20job%20title.
“if Buddha or Jesus lived today”: Jesse Hyde, “When Spirituality Goes Viral,” Playboy, February 18,
2019, https://www.playboy.com/read/spirituality-goes-viral.
quotegrams: Sophie Wilkinson, “Could Inspirational Quotes Be Instagram’s Biggest Invisible Cult?,”
Grazia, September 30, 2015, https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/inspirational-quotes-instagrams-
biggest-invisible-cult/.
controversial New Age circle called Ramtha: Lisa Pemberton, “Behind the Gates at Ramtha’s
School,” Olympian, July 15, 2013, https://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article25225543.html.
the correlation between intelligence and belief in “weird ideas”: M. Shermer and J. S. Gould, Why
People Believe Weird Things (New York: A. W. H. Freeman/Owl Book, 2007).
“immune to superstition”: Stuart A Vyse, Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
the term “conspirituality”: Charlotte Ward and David Voas, “The Emergence of Conspirituality.”
Taylor & Francis, Journal of Contemporary Religion, January 7, 2011,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13537903.2011.539846?journalCode=cjcr20&.
whitewashed yoga classes: Anusha Wijeyakumar, “We Need to Talk about the Rise of White
Supremacy in Yoga.” InStyle, October 6, 2020, https://www.instyle.com/beauty/health-fitness/yoga-
racism-white-supremacy.
over half of the Republicans surveyed: Tommy Beer, “Majority of Republicans Believe the QAnon
Conspiracy Theory Is Partly or Mostly True, Survey Finds,” Forbes, September 2, 2020,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/09/02/majority-of-republicans-believe-the-qanon-
conspiracy-theory-is-partly-or-mostly-true-survey-finds/?sh=3d8d165b5231.
The glossary goes on and on: “Conspirituality-To-QAnon (CS-to-Q) Keywords and Phrases,”
Conspirituality.net, https://con spirituality.net/keywords-and-phrases/
nightmarish crimes: Lois Beckett, “QAnon: a Timeline of Violence Linked to the Conspiracy
Theory.” Guardian. October 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/qanon-
violence-crimes-timeline.
dystopian video game: Alyssa Rosenberg, “I Understand the Temptation to Dismiss QAnon. Here’s
Why We Can’t,” Washington Post, August 7, 2019,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/07/qanon-isnt-just-conspiracy-theory-its-highly-
effective-game/.
a cognitive analysis of QAnon: Joe Pierre, “The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds,”
Psychology Today, August 12, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-
unseen/202008/the-psychological-needs-qanon-feeds.
About the Author
AMANDA MONTELL is a writer and language scholar from Baltimore,
Maryland. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Wordslut: A Feminist
Guide to Taking Back the English Language, which she is developing for
television with FX. Her writing has appeared in Marie Claire,
Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The Rumpus, Nylon, Byrdie, and Who What
Wear, where she formerly served as the features and beauty editor. Amanda
holds a degree in linguistics from NYU and lives in Los Angeles’ Silver
Lake neighborhood with her partner, plants, and pets.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Copyright
CULTISH. Copyright © 2021 by Amanda Montell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-
American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the
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Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover illustrations © CSA Images/Getty Images (UFO); © klerik78/iStock/Getty Images (pattern)
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* Booze was 3HO heresy, so in place of happy hour everyone guzzled gallons of tea. Specifically,
members drank Yogi Tea, a multimillion-dollar brand you yourself can find in almost every
American grocery store. This was no accident: Yogi Tea was created and owned by Yogi Bhajan. It’s
not 3HO’s only corporate endeavor—among the group’s many enterprises is the half-billion-dollar
company Akal Security, which holds contracts with everyone from NASA to immigration detention
centers. (What’s the word for “late capitalism” in Gurmukhi?)
* The infatuation with cult garb runs deep: In 1997, thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate, a UFO
fringe religion we’ll talk about in part 2, participated in a mass suicide, all wearing matching pairs of
black-and-white ’93 Nike Decade sneakers. Two surviving Heaven’s Gate followers maintain that
their leader chose the footwear for no particular reason other than that he found a good bulk deal.
Nike hastily discontinued the style after the tragedy (nothing like a cult suicide to ruin your product’s
good name), but that made the sneakers an instant collector’s item. At the time of this writing,
twenty-two years post–Heaven’s Gate, a pair of size 12 Nike Decades from 1993 was listed on eBay
for $6,600.
* Although “stan culture”—camps of online superfans who religiously worship and defend music
stars like Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé—has gotten dicier than the celebrity fandom of
generations past. In 2014, a psychiatric study found that celebrity stans tend to struggle with
psychosocial issues like body dysmorphia, cosmetic surgery obsession, and poor judgment of
interpersonal boundaries, as well as mental health conditions like anxiety and social dysfunction. The
same study found that stans may also display qualities of narcissism, stalking behavior, and
dissociation. We’ll talk more about the ups and downs of “pop culture cults” in part 6.
* There are several cultish groups who hide behind the vague moniker “The Family.” This one was a
’60s-born New Age doomsday commune run by a sadistic Australian yoga instructor named Anne
Hamilton-Byrne, who (common story) claimed messiah status and was busted in the late ’80s for
kidnapping over a dozen children and abusing them in aberrant ways, like forcing them to take
ritualistic heaps of LSD.
* Here’s a fun little story: In 1959, a Southern California cult conducted an unusual initiation
ceremony. Men who wished to be part of the clan had to prove their devotion by ingesting a
nightmarish buffet of pig’s head, fresh brains, and raw liver. In his attempts to complete the
challenge, one young recruit named Richard kept vomiting up the concoction, but desperate for
acceptance, he eventually forced it down. Promptly, a hulking mass of liver became wedged in his
windpipe and he choked on it; by the time he reached the hospital, he was dead. But no criminal
charges were ever filed, because this wasn’t actually a “cult”—it was a fraternity at USC, enacting
just one of countless pledge-hazing rituals, which are often far more disgusting, outlandish, and
deadly and involve more vomit (and other bodily fluids) than anything you’ll find in most alternative
religions.
* I’d quickly learn that “HALT” stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired; “future-tripping” is
stressing out over potential events you can’t control; “caught a resentment” means to be overcome by
disdain for someone; and “first things first” is a self-proclaimed AA “cliché” that means just what it
sounds like. Admittedly, these are extremely useful mottos (as are most of the zingers in AA’s clever
lexicon).
* Where and when did Jones get all that cyanide? According to a CNN report, he’d been secretly
stockpiling the stuff for years, preparing for the day he’d need to use it, whenever that might be.
Allegedly, Jones obtained a jeweler’s license in order to purchase the chemical, which can be used to
clean gold.
* Some ’70s-era “anti-cult” movements were just as unhinged as the groups they were combatting.
Throughout its two-decade practice, an organization called the Cult Awareness Network (CAN)
kidnapped and tortured dozens of “cult followers” in an attempt to deprogram them. One of CAN’s
founders, Ted Patrick, got himself into trouble after two parents, concerned about their adult
daughter’s involvement with left-wing politics, paid him $27,000 to abduct her and handcuff her to a
bed for two weeks.
* A “dynamic” in Scientology refers to some element of the universe, starting with the self, then
extending to your family, the community, the species as a whole, and all the way to God or infinity.
Hubbard described eight total dynamics, to which Scientologists refer using acronyms; so, you might
call your spouse your “2D” and your group of friends your “3D.”
* The word “charisma” actually has centuries-old ties to Christianity. It derives from the ancient
Greek word for “gift or favor,” and by the mid-1600s, it’d come to mean “God-given abilities,” like
teaching and healing. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the word evolved to connote an earthly knack for
leadership, and only in the late ’50s was it used in the more pedestrian sense of “personal charm.”
* Raniere, however, lacked Hubbard’s vision, and was caught and charged for racketeering and sex
trafficking, long before building a Scientology-level empire. In 2018, lawyer and religion scholar Jeff
Trexler commented in Vanity Fair, “Not all [aspiring ‘cult leaders’] have the same talent level [as] L.
Ron Hubbard. . . . [He] was a master.” Less a “movement” and more a failed pyramid scheme,
NXIVM, joked Trexler, was like “the Amway of sex.” (Though I’d actually argue that the multilevel
marketing giant Amway is more of a threat to society than NXIVM ever was. We’ll talk about that in
part 4.)
* Scientology actually offers a whole upper-level course extravagantly titled Key to Life where you
word-clear all the grammatical basics—conjunctions, determiners, single-letter words. “Can you
imagine having to look up the word ‘of’?” Cathy asked me. (As a linguist, I actually could, yes,
though certainly not on Scientology’s terms.) Graduating from Key to Life is considered extremely
prestigious just because you’ve invested so many hours of tedium into the church.
* MLMers are willing to turn any tragedy—from a cancer diagnosis to a worldwide pandemic—into
an opportunity to sell and recruit. It didn’t take long after COVID-19 ravaged the US in early 2020
for MLM recruits to start making public claims that their products could protect against both the
virus and financial insecurity. The Federal Trade Commission sent warnings to over fifteen direct
sales companies, including Arbonne, dōTERRA, and Rodan + Fields, after their affiliates blew up
social media with images of “immunity-boosting” essential oils, captioned with the hashtags “#covid
#prevention,” and verbiage like “RODAN and FIELDS is always open for business even during
quarantine! I’ve been working from home for over 3 years now and still making money when other
people aren’t! Isn’t it about time you found out what it is I do and how this company really
works? . . . #workfromhome #financialfreedom.”
* The full quote from which this idiom purportedly derives reads, “This Text holdeth their noses so
hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their faces,” a reference to working hard to avoid
punishment. It was written in 1532 by John Frith, a Protestant priest who was burned at the stake a
few months later for publicly questioning the English Catholic Church. Isn’t blending church and
state fun?
* This is a real workout that exists in LA at a studio called Sandbox Fitness. In a room covered in
actual sand, clients mount stationary surfboards and perform a variety of nearly impossible strength
exercises aided by resistance bands dangling from the ceiling. I learned of this unusual torture from a
modelesque action film star whom I interviewed for a magazine article in 2017. “You get so ripped,”
she gushed, her pupils dilating. “I do it every morning. You have to try it.”
* Then in 2016, an attendee got injured in Manuel-Davis’s class and filed a lawsuit. To the
devastation of her many acolytes, Manuel-Davis resigned from SoulCycle in 2019 to launch a
boutique fitness cult of her own called AARMY, in partnership with another former SoulCycle idol
named Akin Akman, whose loyal gaggle of fiendish riders were known as “Akin’s Army.”
* In some cases, getting “seriously ripped” can cost you your vital organs. Experts have noted a
strong association between CrossFit and rhabdomyolysis, a rare medical condition that results from
working your muscles so hard that they break down and release toxic proteins into the bloodstream,
which can cause kidney damage or failure. CrossFit coaches are so familiar with the condition that
they’ve given it a nickname: Uncle Rhabdo. In some boxes, you’ll find depictions of Uncle Rhabdo
as a sickly clown hooked up to a dialysis machine, his kidneys spilling onto the floor. (“Pukie,” a
different ghoulish clown, is a more prominent mascot.) Online, I found a handful of T-shirts for sale
featuring the slogan “Go Until You Rhabdo.”
* Because the majority of Dispenza’s followers get to know him through his carefully crafted
internet persona, most never dig to find out he’s connected to a controversial New Age circle called
Ramtha. The group was founded in the late ’80s by a self-proclaimed ESP master (and proud Trump
supporter) named J. Z. Knight, who has been quoted spewing all kinds of QAnon-esque rhetoric and
generally bigoted nonsense (like that all gay men used to be Catholic priests). But Ramtha devotees
—which have included a handful of A-list celebrities—hear what they want to hear and ignore the
rest.
